Hardware rendering makes use of your computer’s graphics hardware, and is much faster than software rendering. However, the quality of hardware rendered images may not always be as high as software rendered images.

If your scene contains hardware particles and you want to software render the scene, you must do the following:

• Software render your scene. The hardware particles won’t appear in the software-rendered scene. See Rendering “Rendering a frame” and “Rendering an animation.”
• Hardware render the hardware particles. See To prepare to preview or render hardware particles.
• Composite the two sets of rendered images using a compositing software.

For more information, see the following topics:

• To prepare to preview or render hardware particles
• Preview hardware particles
• Render hardware particles at final production quality
• View rendered hardware particles.