What about software rendering? [LWN.net]

What about software rendering?

Posted Jul 27, 2006 14:30 UTC (Thu) by talphir (guest, #39482)
Parent article: OLS: Open source graphics drivers

Given today's powerful CPUs, I wonder whether software-rendering would be an alternative for 3D graphics. Essentially the whole 3D game segment on PCs started that way.

It would certainly not be on par with bleeding edge GPUs but hey -- we want something stable, not flashy. It would work on all platforms, is all software and not even require a 3D card anymore.

OpenGL however could turn out to be too flexible an API to perform clever optimizations behind the scenes. I guess one of the secrets of the 90ies DOS games was that your renderer would just implement what the game needed. Not to speak of the overhead of pixel pushing that you have to do with resolutions beyond 320x200... so some downsizing would certainly be necessary, both in terms of APIs and functionality.

Still -- I like that idea. It would give incredible stability and per definition be 100% open source.

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What about software rendering?

Posted Jul 31, 2006 16:10 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

They actually do OpenGL "optimization". Like filtering textures in a way that works only good for horizontal and vertical walls (what the majority of games needs). There are a lot of cheats in the cards/OpenGL drivers to make them benchmark better on popular games. Oh, that's probably a reason why not to open source the driver, but if they choose to cheat, they could do that on their binary-only driver, and still have a competing OS driver that just happend to be more accurate but slower on rendering games.