Rendering Voxels on the CPU!
A creator who goes by the name Vincent on YouTube just released a video showcasing real-time rendering for 3D Voxels entirely on the CPU.
What was achieved
- Real-Time CPU Rendering: yes, the whole 3D environment is rendered on the CPU, the amount of technical challenges to achieve that is just... holy.
- Advanced Lighting Effects: as if rendering blocks wasn't enough, the demo also features sophisticated real-time lighting, soft shadows, point lights, and even global illumination.
- Dynamic Environment: the scene showcased is not even static, it's a procedural day/night cycle. the guy is just flexing at this point
- Runtime Editing: the environment itself can be manipulated in real-time you could remove or add voxels.
Why this is crazy
I'm gonna put it simply: We don't render on CPUs... period. But this guy just had to defy that. GPUs are optimized to render Graphics, 3D or else, that's their main purpose, that's what they do, and for rendering 3D, you'd normally need a GPU with thousands of cores working in parallel, but on a CPU where you have only 10s of cores at best, that are general-purpose and not even optimized for rendering stuff, that's an insane feat. And to raymarch (raytracing related technique) Voxels in real-time on a CPU, that makes it an insane feat++, because like raytracing, raymarching emulates how light behaves in the real world on an advanced level.
Personal take on this
Oh my god.
