Gallium3D LLVMpipe Starts To Smoke

[bridgman]

Doesn't the r300g driver already do that ?

[curaga]

One of these days I'm hoping to starting profiling the r600 driver to see if there's any way I can help. Otherwise, I'll probably start working on fleshing out the GSoC clover implementation a bit (implementing built-in math functions and stuff, conformance testing, etc).

Nothing jumped at me when profiling the PP shaders, but then again the Brazos platform is very balanced.

[Veerappan]

BTW... I'd like to buy a new graphic card, is it good to take an ATI now? I prefer their "open" policy, but I don't know if the open source driver is good enough.
For instance, I have an nVidia card at the moment and if I use Nouveau, the temperature gets higher and higher, way above 100°C.
It took me some time to understand why my PC was freezing without any reason...

Since RadeonHD drivers are based on open specs and aren't retro-engineered, are they more stable?

I don't play huge games on my Linux, but I do 3D programming.

I wouldn't hesitate to go with an AMD card at the moment. Up until 2 months ago, I was running a Radeon 4770 on the open source drivers without any issues. I upgraded to a Radeon 6850 last month, and for work reasons I need to use the Catalyst drivers (paid OpenCL development). As soon as Clover is capable of doing what I need it to do, I'll switch back to r600g+clover.

For desktop usage and lightweight 3D, there's nothing wrong with the OSS radeon drivers. If you need GL 3/4 features, you might need to use the Catalyst drivers. Both sets of drivers have been quite stable for me in Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 x64.

[elanthis]

Why comparing LLVMpipe (which is a software pipe) to RadeonHD and Nouveau (which are hardware accelerated pipes) ?
Why not comparing LLVMpipe to Mesa, to see the real improvements between the two solutions?

Because that would be a worthless comparison. We already know that Mesa3D is slow and pretty much absolutely useless for anything other than being a reference-test renderer. Comparing the speed of anything to that would be like comparing the land speed of a vehicle to that of an office building.

Showing the speed of LLVMPipe on its own is useful. We can see that it hits playable framerates in some cases. Putting the hardware results in there helps give you an idea of just how fast LLVMPipe is, e.g. that it's comparable in speed to a low-end hardware renderer (well, with the FOSS drivers, at least). That's actually meaningful. That tells you that LLVMPipe is serious stuff. You now both have solid numbers telling you if LLVMPipe is fast enough for your needs and you have a meaningful reference point for just how fast it is compared to buying an extra piece of GPU hardware.

[mrugiero]

Because that would be a worthless comparison. We already know that Mesa3D is slow and pretty much absolutely useless for anything other than being a reference-test renderer. Comparing the speed of anything to that would be like comparing the land speed of a vehicle to that of an office building.

Showing the speed of LLVMPipe on its own is useful. We can see that it hits playable framerates in some cases. Putting the hardware results in there helps give you an idea of just how fast LLVMPipe is, e.g. that it's comparable in speed to a low-end hardware renderer (well, with the FOSS drivers, at least). That's actually meaningful. That tells you that LLVMPipe is serious stuff. You now both have solid numbers telling you if LLVMPipe is fast enough for your needs and you have a meaningful reference point for just how fast it is compared to buying an extra piece of GPU hardware.

IMHO, if you have an i5 with 4 cores and more than 3GHz per core, you are not likely to have a slower GPU than what you can achieve using LLVMpipe. Neither are you using (almost sure) a bad supported GPU, like an Unichrome. I'm not even sure if a VIA chipset from that ages can support an i5 processor.
So, the comparison made in the benchmark is still useless.

[oibaf]

The Nexuiz game failed to work on LLVMpipe with this Mesa 7.12-devel snapshot, so the first game that successfully runs was OpenArena.

It works perfectly here. Did you report a bug?

[mattst88]

+1
Compare Mesa and LLVMpipe with CPU with more and more cores, to see if LLVM handles it better than GCC. (but I make a lot of assumptions here, correct me if I'm wrong)

What?

Handles what better than gcc? I'm not sure you know what llvmpipe is. :\