Rendering question

[megamarc]

The palette effects could be implemented with GPU shaders starting at OpenGL 3.0 (DirectX 10) or newer. There are other technical reasons for Tilengine being CPU based without any kind of GPU support. GPU is efficient when filling large batches of data without CPU intervention. But Tilengine renders individual scanlines in order, letting the CPU modify any parameter between scanlines. This strictly disaollows parallelization, as scanlines are sequential. The bottleneck of CPU/GPU communication would be higher than the time spent drawing the tiny amount of pixels required by a single scanline. This would be different for very high resolutions, but Tilengine is geared towards classic/retro pixel art, that is low resolution in nature.

This independence of GPU allows to run Tilengine on any kind of 32-bit CPU and render frames on it, even if it doesn't have video output.

Thanks for asking!