Talk:Software rendering

Article needs clarification and focus

This article drifts between talking about software rendering and hardware rendering, making contradictory statements that:

1) Software rendering is unaided by a graphics card, or specialized hardware.

2) That video game consoles use software rendering, and custom hardware.

3) That "Because there are still PC systems being sold with limited graphics cards (or none at all), software rendering will always be required for some applications." (This implies that software rendering co-exists with graphics card rendering.)

The article needs to start by explaining the concept of "software rendering" vs. "hardware rendering", and go from there to explain that most systems are some combination of the two.

Also, the peacock language particularly gets in the way in this article -- the concept is difficult enough in itself to nail down without introducing vague and debatable phrases such as "death of software rendering", "really popularized 3D gaming", and "games for kids and casual gamers".

Sentences such as this need to be more carefully thought out: "Because of the need for very high-quality and diversity of effects, offline rendering requires a lot of flexibility." This implies that somehow "very high-quality" requires some sort of unstated "flexibility". But more particularly it suggests that the needs for "high quality" and "diversity" affect offline rendering, but not "online", "real-time" rendering -- which is not the case.

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (talk) 13:25, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]


"This was the first time that 3D produced a compelling mainstream experience rather than being a specialist gimmick"

So the claim is, until the playstation, hardware 3D on the PC platform was a "Specialist Gimmick"?

Steven736 (talk) 19:04, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The following have been removed from the article. They were becoming link spam, and people should refer to Wikipedia:External links and only them back judiciously. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:22, 29 March 2013 (UTC)[reply] 

==External links==
* [http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net Burning's Software Renderer] contributed by Thomas Alten to the open source Irrlicht graphics engine.
* [http://www.codeplex.com/Coco3D Coco3D] a portable template-based software renderer for PCs and windows Mobile devices.
* [http://code.google.com/p/gens2/ Gens2 3D] a software-only 3D engine for Win32 platform using DirectX.
* [http://www.image2output.com/prodlist.aspx?cat=1650 HyperMove]  a rendering workflow software.
* [http://luxion.com/hypershot.html Hypershot]  a photorealistic realtime rendering software.
* [http://keyshot.com KeyShot] a photorealistic realtime rendering software.
* [http://www.inartis.com/Products/Kribi%203D%20Engine/Default.aspx Kribi 3D Engine], a self-contained 3D engine featuring an incredibly fast pure software renderer.
* [http://muli3d.sourceforge.net/ Muli3D], an open-source platform-independent software renderer, aimed at education and research.
* [http://www.openrt.de/index.php OpenRT Real-time Raytracing], a project aimed at developing a raytracing standard for interactive 3D graphics.
* [http://www.d6.com/users/checker/misctech.htm Perspective Texture Mapping], series by [[Chris Hecker]] about rasterization and texture mapping fundamentals.
* [http://www.radgametools.com/pixomain.htm Pixomatic], a high-performance software renderer by [[Michael Abrash]] and Mike Sartain with Direct3D 7-class features; supports games like ''[[Unreal Tournament 2004]]'' and ''[[Medal of Honor (computer game)|Medal of Honor]]''.
* [http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/renderer.html Renderer 2.0], an open-source ([[GPL]]) software renderer with per-pixel [[Phong shading]], [[Z-Buffer]], [[shadow mapping]] and [[ambient occlusion]]. Uses autoconf/automake and libSDL, and thus compiles and runs under Linux,Windows/MinGW,FreeBSD and MacOSX. It is written in C++, and uses [[OpenMP]] or Intel TBB to take advantage of multi-core machines.
* [http://renderman.pixar.com/ RenderMan], a rendering software system for high quality, photorealistic image synthesis
* [http://www.transgaming.com/business/swiftshader SwiftShader], a highly advanced multi-platform software renderer with [[Shader Model|Shader Model 3.0]] level features.
* [http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Soft-Wired_Shaders.shtml swShader] was the open source precursor of SwiftShader. Most recent version before it was removed from [http://sourceforge.net/projects/sw-shader/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/sw-shader] is available [ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/graphics/packages/swshader-softwire here].
* [https://github.com/trenki2/SoftwareRenderer Trenki's Software Renderer/Rasterizer], a small open-source platform-independent software renderer implementation with fixed point math, supports vertex and pixel shaders written in C++.
* [http://www.softwarerenderer.com Vigilante Software Graphics] a modern software renderer still under development.
* [http://code.google.com/p/msr-zbethel-tu/ Multithreaded Software Rasterizer], a multithreaded open source rasterizer optimized with SSE.
* [http://sourceforge.net/projects/yeti3dpro/   YETI3D  (OFFICIAL ENGINE by Derek John Evans)]  A powerfull engine on software render with tools
* [http://code.google.com/p/yeti3dplusplus/   YETI3D++ (improved engine)]  A powerfull engine on software render with tools\

Outdated info

"Techniques for high realism like raytracing and global illumination are also inherently unsuited for hardware implementation and in most cases are realized purely in software."


This statement is false, modern gpus released by nVidia such as the 4000 series can run full ray tracing global illumination simulation in real time.

Introducing GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs | GeForce News | NVIDIA


Heres an article with a relevant game utilizing this technique on modern pc hardware.


Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Path Tracing: Full Path Tracing, Fully Unnecessary | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com) 98.184.64.206 (talk) 15:08, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Notes on usage of "software rendering" and "hardware rendering" in books

In case it is useful here... a while ago I did some informal research on how these terms are used in popular computer graphics books/texts. I summarized what I found in the Talk page for Rendering (computer graphics).

This information was used to guide the content of the Hardware and software rendering subsection in Rendering (computer graphics). KaiaVintr (talk) 15:42, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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