LLVMpipe May Be A Bit Closer To Running GNOME Shell

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LLVMpipe May Be A Bit Closer To Running GNOME Shell

Last month we looked at the performance of the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver that can provide software acceleration for the OpenGL-Mesa state tracker (among other state trackers via this driver architecture) on any modern CPU via LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) to optimize and handle these operations much more efficiently than the traditional Mesa software rasterizer...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODI3NQ

[thefirstm]

Software acceleration? I think you mean software deceleration!

[blackshard]

Software acceleration? I think you mean software deceleration!

Yup! It would be truly nice to see your newest flamming quad core processor dealing with such useless tasks. Hey, we got powerful processors, now we can waste their power with useless things!

[aaaantoine]

Software acceleration? I think you mean software deceleration!

When hardware 3D acceleration first came onto the scene, it was called "hardware acceleration" precisely because software rendering was slow.

[curaga]

Virge DX anyone?

[DeepDayze]

Virge DX anyone?

I still happen to have an old ViRGE DX card around..that card was the shiznit in its time :^)

[curaga]

I have one as well. It's the real hw decelerator.

[V!NCENT]

The first gaphics cards I personally owned where a Diamond Viper 550 and a Monster Voodoo card in the same system specifically for Quale 2. They were supposed to work together, but it was buggy as hell

[devius]

Virge DX anyone?

Just bought a Virge GX 4MB the other day for my "486 ressurection" project And I actually owned a virge GX2 back in the early pentium2 days. It managed to be slower than software rendering with very similar visuals. Things have certainly changed a lot in the last 12 years. It should be interesting to run this software rasterizer on a 48-core opteron system and see how it compares to a cheap GPU.