I've seen a demo, I can't remember which, where someone developed a voxel engine with very fine grained voxels, which ran mostly with shaders. The results were

I've seen a demo, I can't remember which, where someone developed a voxel engine with very fine grained voxels, which ran mostly with shaders. The results were pretty impressive. The easier it is to program a GPU the faster programmers will do more and more on the GPU. I personally don't like software voxels, they're too big and ugly. There is much more potential in doing procedural geometry with proper instantiation.