In Computer Science, a system is said to be soft real-time if the correctness of an operation depends not only upon the logical correctness of the operation but also upon the time at which it is performed. Tasks completed after their respective deadlines are less important than those whose deadlines have not yet expired. This leads to some tasks not being performed if the system load is too high.

An important use of this is in multimedia applications in which processing must be performed to display a sequence of video frames. It is not imperative that every frame be processed; instead it is more important that the frames be processed in a timely manner.

Soft real-time can be compared with hard real-time where the operation must be completed within the deadline, and is valueless beyond this deadline.

Real-time computing