OSMesa State Tracker + LLVMpipe Support Published

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OSMesa State Tracker + LLVMpipe Support Published

Brian Paul has published an initial OSMesa state tracker along with OSMesa support for the LLVMpipe and Softpipe drivers...

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

[smitty3268]

So with this, is there any reason to still keep the swrast driver around anymore? It seems like softpipe should now be able to do everything swrast could and more.

[mattst88]

So with this, is there any reason to still keep the swrast driver around anymore? It seems like softpipe should now be able to do everything swrast could and more.

The softpipe driver is much slower than swrast.

[plonoma]

Isn't this capability also present in newer versions of opengl?
Rendering offline.

It would be neat if OSMesa could add support for using opengl offline rendering features.

[mczak]

The softpipe driver is much slower than swrast.

I don't think that's necessarily true, at least not for newer stuff using shaders - I would say they are similarly slow as molasses :-)
But anyway if you want performance (as far as software renderers go) use llvmpipe which beats both of them by at least an order of magnitude.

[mczak]

Isn't this capability also present in newer versions of opengl?
Rendering offline.

This is more for old apps not wanting to get ported - but yes nowadays (ok maybe since ten years or so...) you'd usually just use fbo's to achieve the same.

It would be neat if OSMesa could add support for using opengl offline rendering features.

That doesn't make sense. The ordinary software renderers certainly support fbo's already, OSMesa just provided an abstraction when this wasn't available (and when hw acceleration wasn't widespread).