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?
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.
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.