Quote:
Originally Posted by WanderingKnight
Well, if you're playing games, then your PC will be rendering 3D. Unless the only thing you want to play are ero-games, of course  |
I suppose this is a mnemonic problem. The rendering you are refering to (for games), is usually done in the memory of the graphics card (3D acceleration, uses a subset of rendering techniques that a typical software renderer uses... usually such techniques that are very easy to parallelize and are naturally fast. This rendering is usually done on the GPU). In contrast the software rendering is done on the CPU and uses large amounts of RAM (depends on image size to render, and z-depth).
I suppose 3D modeller based software rendering was meant in conjunction with the RAM size.
(On a sidenote... with the introduction of DX10 many of these software renderers can do large parts of the work in the shaders of the graphics card... they could even do that on DX9 or 8, but the shaders there are too restrictive... a today widely used approach is e.g. drawing quite realistic shadows with shaders).