GPGPU and HSA is coming to LibreOffice with a new version of Calc. Future versions of the spreadsheet program will be OpenCL accelerated in an effort to boost performance. ExtremeTech Menu. AMD Forces a LibreOffice Speed Boost With GPU Acceleration. Via hardware acceleration in LibreOffice. On modern hardware, even without GPU acceleration.

As you clearly already know what GPU rendering is. Let me answer what you seem to be asking.

Traditionally, hardware rendering has carried a stigma of being very complex. This has in large part been due to the design of the application programming interfaces (APIs) which have not been well-geared to concealing complexity; that is, the learning curve has been steep. It has also been in part due to an understanding that writing 3D applications -- for which these APIs are heavily geared -- is far more complex than writing 2D ones. Re interface complexity, I'm referring to interfaces like OpenGL and DirectX. Re 3D vs 2D, I'm referring to the mathematics and geometry which goes into constructing 3D scenes, vs. The simplicity with which the untrained mind can approach 2D problems. However, in recent years, not only has learning material become much more available, but also, many libraries that wrap the underlying complexities of these interfaces have become available and have lowered the barriers to entry.

All of this has fed back into a cycle of increased interest which was already present due to the increasing importance of visualisation, slick user interfaces, and performance on low-powered devices. So software rendering and 2D rendering have been good entry points and focus areas for those who were new to graphics and / or wanted to create a product where rendering did not take too much of the available time on a project. At least in regards to 2D, this still applies; technology has largely covered the gap in bringing 2D rendering to GPU.

There are some really good answers here, so just to supplement them. A major driving force behind software rendering is capability. This was touched on in one of the answers, but I'm going to make an opposing point: software rendering can actually be more capable than hardware rendering, not less. With hardware you're generally limited to the capabilities of the hardware itself, although OpenGL for one is capable of software-emulation of a lot of things that may not exist in hardware. What that means is that if you try to use Feature X but the hardware doesn't support it, one of two things will happen: either you'll drop back to software emulation (the typical OpenGL scenario) or you don't get to use it at all (the typical D3D scenario).

With software rendering you get to write the code yourself. You get to manipulate things and have full control over what happens down to the pixel level.

To give an example of a blast from the past, Quake had pixel shaders implemented in software back in 1996, at a time when 3D cards (they weren't called 'GPUs' then) could barely rasterize a few dozen textured triangles. Autobiography of apj abdul kalam in hindi pdf. This is more the case with current GPUs too, but there are still significant parts of the graphics pipeline that are exposed as fixed functionality (or not even exposed at all). Software rendering can scale out better. It's only relatively recent that we've seen multi-GPU setups becoming really viable, but software can scale across many many CPU cores in many many servers. You can have entire server farms dedicated to this, and professional render farms will still use software rendering. Software can expose different rendering paradigms.

Current hardware is very focussed around the triangle/vertex/fragment/rasterization paradigm; it's a case of picking one thing and optimizing it until it screams for mercy. GPUs are still a poor choice for e.g ray tracing, which is more commonly implemented in software. Of course when it comes to a direct apples-to-apples comparison a GPU will beat software any day of the week - provided we're comparing areas where GPUs are stronger. But that's not to say that they're stronger in every area. Despite that, and for the purposes of this SE site, using hardware is generally the way to go but just be aware that there are use cases out there where software is also viable. Hardware or is, as you guessed using the graphical processing unit (aka Video Card) to render an image.