Gallium3D LLVMpipe On The Sandy Bridge Extreme

For the World of Padman game, which is not too graphically rich either, the LLVMpipe driver on the Core i7 3960X overclocked to 4.5GHz is putting out just 33 FPS at 1280 x 1024. At 1920 x 1080 the average FPS on LLVMpipe for this top-end Sandy Bridge Extreme CPU is just 26 FPS, meanwhile the Radeon HD 5450 on Catalyst 11.11 at this resolution was 80 FPS.

The Urban Terror numbers are even lower for LLVMpipe with an average FPS of just 42 when at 640 x 480. The Radeon HD 5450 PCI Express graphics card on the Catalyst driver was more than four times faster.

A one thousand dollar CPU still cannot beat a $30 graphics card for handling OpenGL, but at least this is an interesting and fun computationally intense test that heavily involves LLVM. The Intel Core i7 3960X carries a $1050 USD retail price at the time of publication while the AMD Radeon HD 5450 goes for about $30 USD or less. At least though the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition processor can easily handle running GNOME Shell on the CPU, if you happen to have an expensive workstation that does not have a suitable graphics card or driver, or are simply using this Gallium3D driver for development purposes. Otherwise, graphics work simply is not designed for the CPU. You can find LLVMpipe performance numbers from other Intel/AMD processors in the various LLVMpipe Phoronix articles.

Stay tuned for the rest of the Intel Core i7 3960X Linux performance results as they are quite interesting -- again, the Sandy-E CPU can handle building the Linux kernel in under one minute.