How exactly does it work, and why do people say it’s “less resource intensive”?
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Software Rendering (the CPU doing all the work) is to Hardware Rendering (The GPU doing almost all the work) as a single person manufacturing an item by hand from scratch is to an assembly line cranking out that item.
Sure, that single person represents less resources than an entire assembly line, but they are way less efficient and are going to take a lot longer to produce the same result. But if you don’t care about how quickly it gets done, you can always fall back on them to deliver the result you want.
That single person (the CPU) can do this because their entire job is to take a list of instructions on how to do something by hand from scratch, and they can produce any result that can be described by such instructions (this is basically what a program is).
An assembly line (the graphics hardware) on the other hand can only produce the limited set of results that the assembly line was made to produce, usually based on partially finished stuff given to it by the aforementioned person. But it’s really good at it because at each step where it does something, it’s really fast at doing that particular thing.
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