Mesa "Vallium" - Software/CPU-Based Vulkan Based On LLVMpipe

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa "Vallium" - Software/CPU-Based Vulkan Based On LLVMpipe

While there has been the CPU-based "Kazan" Vulkan driver (formerly Vulkan-CPU as a Google Summer of Code project) and Google's SwiftShader has been implementing CPU-based Vulkan support, it turns out Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on a Mesa/Gallium3D-inspired Vulkan software renderer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Vallium-Soft-Vulkan

[tildearrow]

If Kazan devs didn't decide to throw their work away to rewrite it in Rust, it could have been integrated into Mesa instead.

But because they did, this has to happen...

[R41N3R]

Great to see a new effort to run Vulkan on a CPU. Hope it will land in Mesa soon :-)

[jojo7887]

Sounds promising, always loved the idea of CPU based rendering. Last month I got Quake 1 (vkQuake) running under Swiftshader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohXU4Mc0Ruo

Other games didn't get much further though.

[angrypie]

Why do those renderers' names have to sound like psychiatric drugs?

[kpedersen]

Sounds promising, always loved the idea of CPU based rendering.

For internal tools I tend to always use software rendering. Slow as hell but always available on any platform

I even have an animation tool maintained from the DOS days. Now I have updated it to use multiple threads, it can finally run at 60fps at 1280x800 resolution. When I originally wrote it, I never imagined I would have a machine that could do that. The rendering API has grown over the years and is now probably substantial enough to make a game out of itself. Could be a fun project .

I bet this Vallium project would be faster though haha.

[ptrwis]

This is cool. Maybe too slow for games, but fast enough to run Vulkan-powered Wayland compositor.

[tildearrow]

Why do those renderers' names have to sound like psychiatric drugs?

It does not to me.

[rabcor]

It does not to me.

Sure, it only sounds like a muscle relaxant.

[StarterX4]

Why do those renderers' names have to sound like psychiatric drugs?

Coz you have to face 25FPS in Quake I ;p