Gallium3D LLVMpipe Compared To Nine Graphics Cards

The LLVMpipe driver on the AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core processor was averaging 13 FPS for Reaction Quake 3 while the GeForce GT 520 with Nouveau was at 19 FPS and the Radeon HD 6570 was averaging 18 FPS.

For the Qfusion-powered Warsow game, the LLVMpipe driver was still sub-10 FPS and about half the speed of the GT 520 and HD 6570 graphics cards.

Lastly, the LLVMpipe driver when running the popular Xonotic open-source first person shooter was at seven FPS for the AMD FX-8350 in both tested LLVMpipe configurations. All of the low-end AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards tested on their open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers were still much faster than this software driver.

LLVMpipe isn't meant to replace GPUs / hardware drivers by any means, but is simply a fallback in cases where there is no hardware acceleration available due to hardware issues or driver problems. With a modern processor, LLVMpipe tends to at least be "good enough" to handle a composited Linux desktop, light WebGL content, and other very basic graphics tasks. LLVMpipe is also useful to driver developers for testing out new code and debugging problems along a hardware-independent driver.