gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

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invictius
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gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by invictius »

Just wondering what speed theoretical cpu would be needed to, say, run brutal doom in a software renderer, at a decent speed. Kind of like how early windows screensavers ran crappy unless you replaced opengl(32?).dll with the one from your hardware-accelerated card.
dpJudas
 
 
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Re: gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by dpJudas »

Try with a Ryzen Threadripper. ;)
invictius
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Re: gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by invictius »

dpJudas wrote:Try with a Ryzen Threadripper. ;)
Wouldn't the cpu be far more important in rendering opengl effects without the use of the video card?
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Rachael
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Re: gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by Rachael »

Depends on how you mean.

Are you talking about emulating OpenGL, itself, or implementing more OpenGL-specific features into the base software renderer, such as shaders and the like?
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Re: gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by dpJudas »

invictius wrote:Wouldn't the cpu be far more important in rendering opengl effects without the use of the video card?
Ryzen Threadripper is a 16 core / 32 thread CPU - meant using the CPU part of it, not its iGPU.
invictius
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Re: gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by invictius »

Rachael wrote:Depends on how you mean.

Are you talking about emulating OpenGL, itself, or implementing more OpenGL-specific features into the base software renderer, such as shaders and the like?
Opengl itself.
dpJudas wrote:
invictius wrote:Wouldn't the cpu be far more important in rendering opengl effects without the use of the video card?
Ryzen Threadripper is a 16 core / 32 thread CPU - meant using the CPU part of it, not its iGPU.
Oh ok, when I looked it up I thought it was a gpu for a minute there.
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Rachael
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Re: gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by Rachael »

OpenGL itself will never run decently on any CPU, even with a huge number of cores, simply due to the fact that a huge amount of it assumes that the processing unit it runs on is hugely parallel. GPU's thrive in this situation because each processing unit (of which, there can be up to thousands of them) pick up a large number of pixels - and hence, in a single clock cycle, thousands of pixels are already filled on the screen.

That being said, there are some emulation options available for OpenGL - two I can think of off the top of my head are MesaGL and SwiftShader.

SwiftShader is by far the faster one, and I just recently found out that it is now Apache-licensed and open-source: https://github.com/google/swiftshader

MesaGL is a MIT-licensed open source library that uses acceleration if available, but otherwise renders a scene itself using a combination of the CPU and an LLVM compiler, similarly but more advanced to how Windows invokes a reference renderer if no acceleration is available. It is the default renderer on Linux when itself has no acceleration, either. Binaries are available on Windows but are hard to come by - mainly due to how bloody difficult the damn thing is to compile, in the first place.
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Re: gzdoom maps/features in software mode?

Post by leileilol »

Before one can think about having software-rendered hackeneyed dynamic-light-actor-abused maps, a surfacecache system would have to be devised in the renderer first.

tl;dr: quake renderer
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