LLVMpipe: OpenGL With Gallium3D on Your CPU

[l8gravely]

My kid loves playing SMC (Super Maryo Chronicles) on my computer, so he'll use 'switch user' to get his own login on there. Unfortunately, the performance is so sucky, that he's given up on it for now.

And I'm not willing to let him login to my account either!

So, my question is, how well does the r300g driver work with an X1650, AMD Athlon X2 5200, 4gb RAM, 1280x1024 display? I'm also running Ubuntu 10.04 with the xorg-edgers repository for my MESA and other drivers.

I'd love to try the r300g driver as well and see how the performance is.

Would it be possible to include games like SMC into your mix as well? It's OpenGL, but a different sort of stress compared to the others.

Thanks,
John

[marek]

Would that work? Could you, say, include some of llvm-pipe inside r300 where it is needed most?

Most of the performance achieved comes from minimizing the number of synchronizations between a GPU and a CPU (kudos to airlied). What you propose is the exact opposite, the outcome is obvious...

[QUOTE=l8gravely;125187]So, my question is, how well does the r300g driver work with an X1650, AMD Athlon X2 5200, 4gb RAM, 1280x1024 display?/QUOTE]
Not sure, it depends on the game/app you want to run. Some apps work, some others don't. We usually try to fix bugs as we come across them or get told about them. The worst bug is the one we don't know about...

[aaaantoine]

Can this be used to accelerate graphics when the GPU doesn't have Hardware T&L, like, for example, my Radeon Xpress 1100?

I've been wondering for years why graphics performance on here has been sucky, until I found out that little bit. <rant>If it doesn't do T&L, it's not a Radeon!</rant>

[marek]

Can this be used to accelerate graphics when the GPU doesn't have Hardware T&L, like, for example, my Radeon Xpress 1100?

Yes, this is even the plan for r300g i.e. using LLVM for T&L (the code is already wired up, we just need to fix a few bugs and then the whole thing can take off) and the rest (i.e. fragment processing). I think this approach might still beat llvmpipe in performance.

[V!NCENT]

@roc:
Well... let's say... my evergreen is now a €150 framebuffer with the FLOSS driver stack x'D

And KDE 4.4.x looks so... shiny with desktop effects and my Phenom 9950 X4 should be able to drag it...

[aliendude5300]

This article is particularly interesting, as I actually have an ATI Radeon X1950PRO 256MB graphics card...

[dashcloud]

Are the benefits from this really only usable by high-end cpus?
I ask because it would be nice to have something extra for my old P4 laptop with a Radeon 345M (which is apparently R100, making it worse than my current Intel 945 card I believe).

[V!NCENT]

Are the benefits from this really only usable by high-end cpus?
I ask because it would be nice to have something extra for my old P4 laptop with a Radeon 345M (which is apparently R100, making it worse than my current Intel 945 card I believe).

From what I can gather: LLVM is faster than whatever happens witbhout one because LLVM takes advantage of multiple threads (so multiple cores, which a p4 doesn't have, right?) and fast instruction sets like SSE 3 and 4, which your p4 doesn't have, right?

So I am guessing that it is only for latest generation cpu's with at least two cores or more...

[smitty3268]

From what I can gather: LLVM is faster than whatever happens witbhout one because LLVM takes advantage of multiple threads (so multiple cores, which a p4 doesn't have, right?) and fast instruction sets like SSE 3 and 4, which your p4 doesn't have, right?

So I am guessing that it is only for latest generation cpu's with at least two cores or more...

I think later P4s actually included SSE3 and went up to 4 cores in the EE models, but judging by that video cards I would guess he has one of the earlier models. Maybe even without hyper-threading.

So in short, no, I'd give up on trying to get a software renderer running well on that laptop. You're probably looking at about 10% of the performance of this machine, and even that was only playable at very low resolutions.

[Michael]

Would it be possible to include games like SMC into your mix as well? It's OpenGL, but a different sort of stress compared to the others.

Submit a Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking profile for such games you want for inclusion and then they pretty much automatically get included in future articles.