Running LLVMpipe With OpenGL 3.3 On Mesa 10.3-devel

Here's some fresh tests of Mesa's LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver for software-based rendering. Since last month, LLVMpipe now supports OpenGL 3.3.

For Mesa 10.2/10.3-devel is now OpenGL 3.3 support for the LLVMpipe driver compared to OpenGL 2.1 compliance in Mesa 10.1.x stable. Just for curiosity sake, I ran some benchmarks on Mesa 10.3-devel using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to see if there's much of a difference compared to Mesa 10.1 when running a few OpenGL Linux gaming tests on this software driver. For kicks I also tossed in the results from an Intel Core i7 ultrabook CPU with Ivy Bridge HD Graphics 4000 to see how LLVMpipe compares these days to real graphics hardware.

The results in full from the testing can be found via OpenBenchmarking.org's 1405307-KH-LLVMPIPEM35.

Overall, there isn't much change for the LLVMpipe benchmarking at the game level between Mesa 10.1 and 10.3-devel. The performance is obviously slow, but the main functionality of LLVMpipe is as a debugging tool for Linux graphics driver developers in having a common and hardware-independent code-path to test, and is now also used as a fallback for composited Linux desktops / window managers expecting OpenGL support on the desktop. See the rest of these quick test results here.