TinyRenderer – how OpenGL works: software rendering in 500 lines of code
I wonder if someday GPUs will be so powerful that we will just program them with small parallelized software renderers. And I don't mean shaders or CUDA, because those are awkward and not easy to use.<p>Will be the case though, since I never really know how GPU are made and wired, and what their constraints are?<p>GPU often had a lot of "fixed" computing capabilities, meaning you have to do things in a certain way to exploit its performance, but with Vulkan being too complex, and chips getting more and more transistors, maybe a day will come where GPUs can finally become easier to program, at the expense of top performance, a bit like interpreted languages being slower to run but faster to write with. In the software industry, it was always better to use faster computers and write less than optimal programs, because chips are always cheaper than developers.<p>I guess most game developers would gladly want to use a GPU for a fraction of the performance, if it was just easier to program with. Modern GPU are so fast that it would feel okay to use 5 or 10% of the speed if it meant not having to deal with vulkan or shaders.