Software rendering

In 1999, our company got started by licensing a superfast 3D software renderer to Intel, and we've constantly invested in R&D for software rendering throughout the last 10 years. That's why Airplay's software renderer is now the fastest for mobile devices today.

Why software rendering?

All of the top 5 handset manufacturers are still creating new flagship devices without hardware graphics acceleration (GPUs). GPUs increase the handset's 'bill of materials'. Furthermore, it is often a complex task to leverage a mobile GPU for the entire device UI, especially if the device UI has to interact with 3rd party applications that might also want to use the GPU.

So, for whatever reasons, great software rendering remains a key component in delivering the best user experiences across all flagships devices.

Built for speed

Airplay's software renderer is built for speed. This means that, out of the box, we'll make some choices for you in terms of balancing speed with image quality. For example, we'll use a 565 colour pipeline rather than 888, and we won't use blinear filtering on your textures. Of course, you can change these choices easily if you wish, as the software renderer is hugely configurable.

Feature-rich

Where do we start? 4-bit, 8-bit and 16-bit textures; palettised and unpalettised; RGB or greyscale lighting; 1-bit or true alpha; lines, tris, quads and n-gons; palette sharing and texel sharing across textures; 565 or 888 pipeline; choice of Z-sorting solutions; nearest or bilinear filtering; mip-mapping; true 3D clipping; perspective-correction on UVs and vertex colours... we could go on.

Modular

With all those features, you might worry about the size of the software rendering library. Well, we're always striving to keep code compact, and for this reason the software renderer has the ability to profile your app's usage, and strip out unused code sections from the library at link time. So you can choose whatever features you like, and not pay any cost in terms of code size for features you're not using.

Optimised for ARM

We work very closely with ARM (in fact, ARM are an investor in our company). Using a combination of our expertise in software rendering, and the unparalleled knowledge of ARM engineers in their own architecture, we've optimised the Airplay software renderer using ARM assembly code. In fact, we've optimised separately for different ARM CPU instruction sets (for example, utilising ARM v6 SIMD instructions to vectorise certain RGB operations).