Gallium3D's LLVMpipe Driver Is Now Much Faster

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 14 April 2013 at 02:04 AM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 24 Comments.

OpenArena 0.8.8 is better with the current Git code than on Mesa 9.1 stable, but still it's a long ways from being playable and much lower than the older and less demanding OpenArena 0.8.5.

World of Padman and Urban Terror are also running much faster on Mesa 9.2-devel, but still not anything meaningful as OpenGL isn't meant for running on a CPU.

The performance is up a hell of a lot for Gallium3D LLVMpipe on Mesa 9.2-devel over the current Mesa 9.1.1 code, but still it's not something you would want to use for gaming and obviously even a very cheap graphics card is superior. Benchmarking LLVMpipe is mostly for fun and interest. However, LLVMpipe is useful in terms of fallback support when GPU hardware drivers fail or are unavailable, can be enough for just running a composited desktop environment, and is also useful for driver developers in testing code against a vendor-neutral driver code-path.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.