Software Mode?

Unity Engine
1

Does Unity have the power to implement a software version of 3D rather than hardware? If I am correct, I believe OpenGL has a software mode, in that no 3D card is needed, only a video card that can handle texture output.

2

No, on both counts.

Unity does not (and never has had) support for direct software rendering.

OpenGL itself does not have a software mode, it is just an API. However some people in the past have implemented software renderers that act sort of like virtual GPUs. SwiftShader is the only one I know of that really exists today in a form still maintained as Google bought it from the original devs years ago and use it in the Chrome browser to support WebGL rendering on machines without WebGL or Direct3D 9 support (as Chrome can translate WebGL to Direct3D 9 on Windows machines).

https://swiftshader.googlesource.com/SwiftShader

There’s also Mesa3D which has a software OpenGL 3.1 implementation.

http://www.mesa3d.org/

3

It’s nice to find out mesa has a the software mode. Sometimes a cpu can do these things faster than an NVidia or Radeon. Especially if the software engine will take advantage of all cpu for rendering. In my legacy computer I have 12 cpu cores, and I am looking to test out software GPU emulator of some kind. I am running linux mint 18.

4

No, not even a little bit. You may have 12 CPU cores, but a GPU has hundreds or thousands, plus the pipeline is specifically optimized for rendering, and a general-purpose CPU is not. The only reason for using a software renderer, in the context of Unity, is if you have no GPU for whatever reason and just need some kind of output no matter how slow and bad (software renderers tend to lack features). But considering that CPUs these days have integrated GPUs, there’s no real point anymore—even though iGPUs are lacking compared to dedicated GPUs, they are far superior to software rendering.

–Eric

5

I tried rendering some wine games, specifically TERA online. It for some reason will not get past the login, it tries to load tera.exe but then it just closes with no error. I noticed the launcher was much slower than hardware.

My cpu doens’t have a graphics core. I am using an old set of Xeon L5640 6-core cpu. 2.8ghz turbo. They run at maximum 60watts each, the reason I just a slower cpu for this T5500 box. I put an radeon RX 460 in it. I have the RX 460 after the T5500 failed to powerup with an GTX 770. (Should have gotton the Rx 470, too late for now, have to pay my bill first.).

Running Linux Mint 18 and the vulkan radeon drivers. These drivers from AMD can be installed on Linux Mint 18, but you will need to edit the install script and hack it so that it will give a report of ubuntu system. Then it will install all of the driver.

see line 3 of the code snippet.

function os_release() {
    [[ -r  /etc/os-release ]] && . /etc/os-release
ID=ubuntu
    case "$ID" in
    ubuntu)
        PACKAGES="amdgpu-pro amdgpu-pro-lib32 amdgpu-pro-dkms"
        ;;
    steamos)
        PACKAGES="amdgpu-pro-driver amdgpu-pro-lib32 "`
            `"glx-alternative-amdgpu-pro amdgpu-pro-dkms"
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Unsupported OS" | stderr
        exit 1
        ;;
    esac
}