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>> the ghost of NAN past will visit you, just be careful.

LOL, solid advice. Early openGl only allowed 8 lights in a lighting pass. So if you had a bunch of lights, you'd have to find the closest ones and just use those. One technique I liked was the index deferred lights, which at the time could run on older hardware that didn't have use of floating point buffers: https://mynameismjp.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/light-indexed-d...



That is when hardware light rendering still existed. We haven't used that in about 15 years.


Why’s this downvoted? Is it not true? I thought lighting was done in software these days?


It’s not really software vs hardware, it’s the fixed function pipeline api vs the shader api.

The fixed function pipeline api only does one thing one way with a lot of limitations while the shader pipeline can basically do anything (doesn’t even have to be rendering a 3D scene) as long as it’s fast enough for your purpose.


> It’s not really software vs hardware, it’s the fixed function pipeline api vs the shader api.

...that sounds like software vs hardware though?

Lighting used to run as a fixed (hardware) function and now it runs via a shader (software) function.


It is true, although a specialized form of software that requires extra hardware, GPUs.




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