Comment summary has weird language (Score 2) 84
The terminology in the summary is confusing and wrong.
First of all, software rendering vs. hardware rendering isn't the same as scanline rendering vs. "rendering from the underlying math", which I assume is a bad attempt at a layman's description of raytracing. You can have a scanline triangle renderer in software, and you can have a raytracer in hardware. It is true that most GPUs are built for scanline rendering and not raytracing, but plenty of raytracers have been written that run on GPUs.
Second, if your renderer runs on the GPU using OpenCL, then it is not a software renderer, it is a hardware renderer, perhaps with a little more of the work done in programmable shaders and a little less done on the fixed function hardware.
What they meant to say was that you can program your own hardware renderer using CL kernels, rather than rely on the ever-decreasing fixed-function hardware that the triangle pipeline normally uses.
The only fixed-function capabilities in a modern GPU are texture filtering and rasterization. The vertex processing, lighting, and shading are all programmable.
There is something interesting and new here, which is that maybe sometime in the future the programmable hardware will be good enough that the fixed-function stuff can be done away with completely.