1.1 KiB
Software 3D Renderer
Features
- OBJ model import
- Depth buffering
- Texture mapping with bilinear filtering
- Lighting (ambient, diffuse, specular)
- Smooth shading
Goals
Implement basic GPU pipeline in software
To best learn what a GPU is doing, I wanted to recreate the functionality of the GPU in software. It's not anywhere near as fast as a GPU of course, but it's not slow either (for a single model that is relatively low-poly).
Good cache performance
The biggest bottleneck of modern CPU performance is latency between memory and the CPU, so I tried to use spatial and temporal locality to keep data in the cache. Although I chose to go for array-of-structs instead of struct-of-arrays, the cache miss rate is fairly low.
Minimal libraries
I created my own very basic OBJ loader (rather than use tinyobj) to better
understand how OBJ files are constructed, along with their respective MTL files.
I also wrote my own linear algebra functions and classes (rather than use glm)
to better understand the low-level math operations.
