What is the difference between Cinnamon and Cinnamon (Software rendering) when choosing a desktop enviornment before logging in?

Okay, what is the difference between Cinnamon and Cinnamon (Software Rendering) when choosing a desktop environment for Ubuntu?

Sub question:

What is the difference between Linux Mint with Cinnamon vs Ubuntu running with the Cinnamon Desktop Environment?

That one use Hardware Acceleration awesomesauce, while the other use your CPU to draw effects (boo!).

Now explaining:

Cinnamon (Software Rendering) the only characteristic is that it uses software rendering to do more of the graphical work, like drawing window borders, moving windows, the bar, etc., and this cannot be changed if you don't have Hardware Acceleration capable GPU.

The Cinnamon has Hardware Acceleration capable techniques available. Is more eye-candy and powerful that the software render, since it uses a dedicated graphics card to make that all the effects looks fluid and fast. The advantage of this is that you can fallback to no-effects environment without problems.

The only real downside to using hardware acceleration is if you have a buggy driver, you can run into more glitches in the graphics (software rendering is more predictable).

For example, with Linux Mint 17, I see issues with Chromium not fully repainting the screen when re-sizing the windows (if I try to use hardware acceleration). I can't perceive any speed difference between the two, though I typically turn off all "eye candy effects" regardless.

If your driver is very buggy, I would imagine hardware acceleration could cause crashes, or your whole system could even run more slowly. Otherwise, I just try the acceleration first, and drop back to software rendering if I see any weirdness (crashes, lockups, repaint issues, etc). Hardware acceleration is great if the the drivers work.