Hacker News Reader

Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

UE5's nanite uses software rendering, but it doesn't look pixelated, does not need a high end computer, and does not require DOS.

View on HN

“Software rendering” usually means “doing rasterization on the CPU”, as opposed to “hardware rendering” that is done by the rasterization primitives of the GPU.

Nanite is a bit weird because it doesn't use the hardware rasterization of the GPU, but it's still doing rasterization on the GPU, so it doesn't really fit this dichotomy.

Its probably not correct to state this. Its probably a combination of how nanite itself is doing Lob, lightning etc.

A mix of software and gpu

At this point words get blurry. Is using CUDA or a compute shader "software rendering" or not?

I call it "like software rendering". Its certainly software rendering in spirit since no fixed function rendering hardware is being used.

Yeah, it may not be in the spirit of 90s software rasterizing, but since you don't offload the transform, lighting, and rasterizing procedures to specialized hardware, you technically do it "with code". The parallelization goes against the spirit though.

Eh, Nanite rasterisation is still happening on the GPU, it's "just" implemented in shaders rather than using the fixed-function pipeline. "Software rendering" is becoming less useful as a descriptor as graphics hardware becomes more general.

No software rendering requires DOS, you could use it with Windows back in the day (how I originally played Half Life) and engines that still support it will run on modern OSes too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com