Software and Hardware Based Rendering

The first distinction we should make is whether we are using any special graphics hardware. On one hand, we can talk about software-based rendering for cases where all required calculations to render 3D scenes are performed using the computer's Central Processing Unit (CPU). On the other hand, as is the case with WebGL, we use the term hardware-based rendering for scenarios where there is a GPU performing 3D graphics computations. From a technical standpoint, hardware-based rendering is much more efficient than software-based rendering, because the former involves dedicated hardware handling the necessary operations. In contrast, a software-based rendering solution can be more common due to the lack of hardware dependencies.