by Rachael » Mon Oct 05, 2020 4:02 am
OpenGL/Vulkan/SoftPoly are the backends. This is the rendering interface that sits directly between the hwrenderer and the system, itself.
SoftPoly happens to use a mix of hardware rendering to actually present its work, and its own brand of CPU rendering to draw it, instead of letting the GPU do it. It tries to minimally emulate OpenGL.
The "software renderer" as we call it, is simply a frontend to that. When enabled, it replaces the polygonal "hwrenderer" (which used to be called the "OpenGL renderer") which, instead of drawing triangles on the screen, draws the screen the classic way, using the CPU.
SoftPoly sits between the hwrenderer and the system, whereas the Software Renderer sits atop any of the backends. Yes, the Software Renderer can be set to render to SoftPoly (and it was the main reason SoftPoly was created), and that should provide a significant speed boost for it.