Category:Software Rasterization
From DmWiki
Software rasterization means using the CPU to rasterize polygons (turn a polygon to a bunch of pixels) instead of letting the GPU ('Graphics Processing Unit') on the graphics card do it. Software rasterization is slower than hardware because it's not hardwired to do the necessary operations without overhead, but in turn it gives more flexibility and compatibility.
A few years ago (when the games industry was developing fast), programmers had to design their own rasterizer, such as in games like Quake and Unreal. These days, software rasterization has fallen behind of hardware rasterization as it's much faster and lets developers concentrate on other aspects of a game than fun low-level rasterization.
Software rasterization has three main uses today:
1: Making your own as a learning experience to better understand how hardware 3D accelerators work.
2: For when speed isn't a priority but features are, such as in art and shader design.
3: As a backup renderer for games on old computers.
4: Making Java games without LWJGL (http://www.lwjgl.org/) or other 3D acceleration bindings. This is useful for web games (applets).
Software Rasterization School
The Software Rasterization School is a series of articles written by Mihail Ivanchev and Hans Törnqvist . It was originally published on [Devmaster.net (http://devmaster.net)], under the title "Software Rendering School", and with kind permission converted to the wiki, making it now open for editing and improvement. The original series can still be found here : [Software Rendering School (http://www.devmaster.net/articles/software-rendering/part1.php)]
- Part I: Introduction
- Part II: Projection
- clipping
- Part III: Triangle Rasterization
- Part IV: Shading and Filling
