For some background, I've been writing 3D code since the early '90's and spent years working at SGI, games studios, all doing realtime 3D. The tech pendulum sw

For some background, I've been writing 3D code since the early '90's and spent years working at SGI, games studios, all doing realtime 3D. The tech pendulum swings between solving problems in hardware vs software constantly. Right now, we're somewhere between the two endpoints with the way shaders moved a lot of ASIC behavior into software. Software vs hardware 3D rendering speed is just one aspect of the differences between both approaches. Hardware graphics pipelines all share a common design - a high throughput deep pipeline which maximizes geometry and pixel throughput. The hardware is incredibly powerful, but you're still communicating with it via a thin little unidirectional pipe relative to its performance, so by using hardware, you end up having a common architecture in rendering engines; that of a retain mode renderer which tries to upload as much static content to the card as possible, then spends whatever time is possible on animated content. That's why today's games all look positively glorious and beautifully shaded, but if you look close, they're all fundamentally a few characters moving around a large static world. The 3D hardware systems simply aren't optimized for dynamically changing all that much of the scene. Back when we did pure software rendering, we had much more flexibility in our approaches, and there was a lot more dynamic rendering - fully deformable worlds. I miss the huge variety of games which were possible back then. They are still possible today, since hardware is far more capable, but due to being off the optimized path, you can't compete on look and feel, so you lose in the market.