Gallium3D Softpipe Hits GLSL 3.30 Compliance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gallium3D Softpipe Hits GLSL 3.30 Compliance

The Gallium3D "Softpipe" driver as the most crude software fallback driver now supports GL Shading Language 3.30...

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

[airlied]

it actually advertises GL 3.3 now, but you'd know that if you read the commit msg. you had one job...

[Azpegath]

it actually advertises GL 3.3 now, but you'd know that if you read the commit msg. you had one job...

On another note: This is great! When using our software on VMWare it seems like we have to run software rendering (preferably with LLVMpipe since that's a multitude of times faster), and this is very welcome in respect to that. On Xen there seems to be proper driver pass-through (or whatever it's called) though.

[stativ]

I have always been wondering what is the point of having multiple software implementations, when LLVMpipe is clearly better than softpipe.

[airlied]

I have always been wondering what is the point of having multiple software implementations, when LLVMpipe is clearly better than softpipe.

softpipe is more of a reference implementation, simple codebase to follow. I'm using it to prototype ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support where writing llvmpipe support would be a lot more work and validation.

Dave.

[DanL]

it actually advertises GL 3.3 now, but you'd know that if you read the commit msg. you had one job...

The article doesn't say that softpipe doesn't advertise 3.3 (unless you read too much into the "catching up" phrase)...

[airlied]

The article doesn't say that softpipe doesn't advertise 3.3 (unless you read too much into the "catching up" phrase)...

"For a while now, LLVMpipe has supported OpenGL 3.3 fully beyond just the GL Shading Language requirements,"

Reading is hard.

Dave.

[DanL]

"For a while now, LLVMpipe has supported OpenGL 3.3 fully beyond just the GL Shading Language requirements,"

Yeah, that's llvmpipe. It's unrelated to your previous comment.

Reading is hard.

Writing coherently seems to be much harder for you (because it's unclear what part of the article you disagree with).

[airlied]

Yeah, that's llvmpipe. It's unrelated to your previous comment.


Writing coherently seems to be much harder for you (because it's unclear what part of the article you disagree with).

That line I quoted. What does "fully beyond the GLSL requirements" mean, mentioning that llvmpipe supports GL 3.3 fully beyond GLSL requirements, where he is comparing llvmpipe to softpipe. Does it perhaps point out that softpipe only supports the GLSL requirements?

from memory he did the same thing when llvmpipe got GLSL 3.30, article about that, then noticed it was GL 3.3 compliant and pulled another article out.

Dave.

[smitty3268]

softpipe is more of a reference implementation, simple codebase to follow. I'm using it to prototype ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support where writing llvmpipe support would be a lot more work and validation.

Dave.

It can also run without pulling in LLVM as a dependency, which can be nice for certain projects that just want something to run GL commands offline where the speed doesn't matter, or some niche system that doesn't have a port of LLVM.