The Different Gallium3D Drivers Available

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Different Gallium3D Drivers Available

Due to some user confusion after this morning's Intel Gallium3D article regarding what Intel IGPs are actually covered by this community-alternative to Intel's official classic Mesa driver, here's an overview of all the different Gallium3D drivers...

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

[hechacker1]

What happened to the SVGA gallium driver?

I've been using it instead of VMware's classic driver for a month now, and a couple days ago, after doing a git pull on mesa head, the ./configure --enable-gallium-svga is no longer an option. In fact it seems a lot of the --enable options have disappeared.

Did I miss something?

After using the gallium driver for about a month, the classic vmware driver seems like molasses in comparison. I almost get the impression the classic driver is no better than a software vesa driver.

[marek]

What happened to the SVGA gallium driver?

I've been using it instead of VMware's classic driver for a month now, and a couple days ago, after doing a git pull on mesa head, the ./configure --enable-gallium-svga is no longer an option. In fact it seems a lot of the --enable options have disappeared.

Did I miss something?

After using the gallium driver for about a month, the classic vmware driver seems like molasses in comparison. I almost get the impression the classic driver is no better than a software vesa driver.

The configure options have been changed. See ./configure --help, in particular --with-gallium-drivers=.

[hechacker1]

The configure options have been changed. See ./configure --help, in particular --with-gallium-drivers=.

Thanks! I'll take a look at that. I just went through the git logs, and svga has been worked on a bit since I last checked out the tree. Glad to see its still there.

[smitty3268]

While better than Softpipe, LLVMpipe at the moment is still quite slow and really isn't too useful unless you have an extremely fast CPU.

Compile it with -fno-builtin-memcmp, get an instant 50% performance boost at least on 1 app. Yes, GCC's memcmp is really that bad.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ne/009077.html

[chaos386]

Is there going to be a third Radeon driver for when Graphics Core Next comes out?

[Xheyther]

Compile it with -fno-builtin-memcmp, get an instant 50% performance boost at least on 1 app. Yes, GCC's memcmp is really that bad.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ne/009077.html

The GCC's memcmp isn't really bad generaly speaking, it's just too versatile to be really efficient.

[dargllun]

Phoronix: The Different Gallium3D Drivers Available
LLVMpipe: This is the ideal Gallium3D driver to use if interested in CPU-based software acceleration. LLVMpipe is basically the equivalent of Mesa's software rasterizer that just renders everything using the CPU and system memory. Besides being a fall-back in cases where no hardware driver may be available, it's also useful for driver developers in debugging situations. What makes LLVMpipe better than the other alternative, Softpipe, is that it leverages the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) for optimizing the process and being able to take better advantage of modern processors.

Does this also mean that LLVMpipe is used where a hardware driver does not implement a specific feature? Or is the fallback always to soft-pipe? If so, why?

[marek]

Does this also mean that LLVMpipe is used where a hardware driver does not implement a specific feature? Or is the fallback always to soft-pipe? If so, why?

There is no fallback currently. You can't switch between a hardware driver and a software driver on the fly. However drivers can use the auxiliary Draw module, which implements vertex processing in software and which softpipe and llvmpipe use as well.

llvmpipe can be used if hardware drivers are non-existent or non-functioning though.