what is swiftshader ?

Question

SwiftShader is an advanced software renderer with Direct3D 8/9 class features, including shaders.

please explain above in simple terms and an example

Answer 1

SwiftShader provides 3D rendering capabilities to your computer, without requiring a 3D graphics card. All the calculations are performed on the central processor instead.



It currently supports games and other applications that use the Direct3D 9 or OpenGL ES 2.0 software interface (the standards used to communicate with the graphics subsystem). It supports all the features of an advanced Direct3D 9 graphics card, including Shader Model 3.0. Shaders are bits of code which compute custom lighting effects and such.



While your central processor is typically slower at these calculations, it does not have the hardware limitations that graphics cards (or integrated chips) have. So SwiftShader allows for instance to run Team Fortress 2, a Direct3D 9 game, when you don't even have a graphics card capable of Direct3D 9 effects.

Answer 2

It makes your computer think that you have direct x 8/9 features

a good example is on games. There are many games that requires direct x 8-9 but you don't have that in your pc. Download swiftshader and put the files in the root folder of your game and it should work fine now. Although it maybe a bit slow on your computer since you really don't have the actual directX.

Answer 3

he SwiftShader software GPU toolkit is a modular system capable of supporting 3D rendering through a variety of possible APIs and on several different hardware and operating system configurations. For example, the SwiftShader demo build includes support for DirectX® 9 Shader Model 3.0 on 32 and 64 bit Windows®. In other cases, SwiftShader might use a custom API specifically built to your specifications, and be deployed on several different operating systems and CPUs.

Answer 4

It's a program that fakes the computer into thinking you have a 3D videocard. So you can run 3D games, though very slowly.