this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Programming
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CPUs nowadays are fast enough to render 3D graphics in real time?
Sure, and they were back in the day too. Games like Quake (and others around that era) had the option of rendering in software using the CPU if the user didn't have a GPU. On slower systems it wasn't a very enjoyable experience, but an OG Pentium at 75mhz was enough to make it playable.
Nowadays modern games don't usually have software renderers built in, so it's difficult to know how much graphics you could push with purely a modern CPU.
I wonder: Server CPUs can have like 10+ cores, if compilers can optimize rasterization and transformations to become really fast .... but yeah requiring an average user to have this system is pretty expensive lol.
LLVMpipe to my understanding is GPU emulation on CPU on Linux.
I actually just stumbled across this video of a modern software renderer that can leverage modern multicore CPU's, and it's pretty impressive.