I am using fovisros and freenect with ros indigo and Ubuntu 14.04 The included fovishydroopenni.launch remap imageraw to camera/depthregistered/swregistered/imagerectraw

The problem is freenect do not publish /swregistered/* topics, related to rgbdlaunch package, so I simply switched to hw, so that it become camera/depthregistered/hwregistered/imagerectraw, and odometry seems to be working.

The question is, there a difference between both hw and sw processing? Is it safe to use either?