[kvark]

Because it has to go through gpu anyway before it reaches the screen, gpu can be more efficient at doing this (better battery, etc), and we are wasting time transferring the pixels to gpu where the splines would be much more compact.

[kevingadd]

minor nit: it seems like they're not rasterizing every pixel on cpu, instead just generating heightmap values instead, which is a lot lower resolution?

and games like Dreams have proven that you can ship world class experiences using CPU rasterization. If it's easier and it performs good enough, nothing wrong with it.

[phire]

We there are two different things here.

The custom CPU rasteriser (Star Machine) that pushes 4k 120hz is mentioned in the intro, but the implementation of spline-based terrain covered by the article is just a prototype developed in blender. Blender is used for faster rapid iteration of the algorithm.

While the Blender version is at least partially GPU accelerated, the final implementation in Star Machine will be entirely on the CPU. It's currently unknown if the CPU implementation will trace against the cached height map or against a sparse point cloud (also cached)