this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
60 points (100.0% liked)
Programming
26138 readers
730 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.