this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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It's gonna take decades to be able to render 1080p CP2077 at an acceptable frame rate with just software rendering.
It's all software, even the stuff on the graphics cards. Those are the rasterisers, shaders and so on. In fact the graphics cards are extremely good at running these simple (relatively) programs in an absolutely staggering number of threads at the same time, and this has been taken advantage of by both bitcoin mining and also neural net algorithms like GPT and Llama.
It's a shame you're being downvoted; you're not wrong. Fixed-function pipelines haven't been a thing for a long time, and shaders are software.
I still wouldn't expect a threadripper to pull off software rendering a modern game like Cyberpunk, though. Graphics cards have a ton of dedicated hardware for things like texture decoding or ray tracing, and CPUs would need to waste even more cycles to do those in software.