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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

What am I missing here? Why is it cool to not use the fast GPU and instead do everything slow in a software renderer on the CPU? It surely is interesting to do it for the sake of it, but are there any practical use cases?

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There's no real practical use case besides just being a fun hobby project

There are some niche cases where software rendering on the CPU is used nowadays but it's pretty rare

There are a lot of optimizations that could be done to make a CPU renderer faster, but even so I don't think there are many real world use cases

Then I probably should not have commented here, as I am very practical and l'art pour l'art is not my take. But I hope you had fun and continue to have fun ;)

It's much easier to debug. And CPUs are actually fast enough to do real-time rendering of simple scenes. Because writing for the CPU is so different, and so much easier than writing for the GPU, a pure software stack allows you to explore new ideas.

Exploring new ideas without worrying about GPUs was exactly one of my motivations :)

Running it remotely on a cloud instance? Or on any machine without a GPU.

Well yeah, I remember those software renderer options from old computer games.

I might not have known the difference between GPU and CPU back then, but I learned very quickly that Software renderer means slow and makes your Computer very hot. Not cool (literally) I thought back then.

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