Whats the difference between hardware accelerated and software rendering demos?
Demos that only rely on software rendering do not make any use of special capabilities of the installed graphics card. Everything shown is computed by the cpu in contrast to 3d accelerated demos, where most of the actual computations are done by the graphics card. That’s why it (almost) doesn’t matter what kind of graphics card is installed when you run software rendered demos: It won’t run faster after you’ve installed a newer graphics card. As a side effect, the compatibility and driver issues are minor. To compensate for the high cpu load, software rendering demos usually run in a lower resolution and/or colour depth than their 3d graphics hardware accelerated counterparts. Note that most demos released before the year 2000 are software rendering ones. Raytracing demos or demos that show simple 2d effects don’t benefit much from additional graphics hardware power due to their technical nature (pun alert;)).
