Gallium3D LLVMpipe On The Sandy Bridge Extreme

The usual assortment of Mesa-compatible ioquake3 games was run on LLVMpipe from the overclocked Core i7 3960X at 4.5GHz. Mesa 7.12-devel Git master was used from 12 December for the LLVMpipe driver on an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS snapshot. LLVM 3.0 was the compiler version in use. This is the Intel system that can build the Linux kernel in under 60 seconds or under 50 seconds when running at the overclocked speed.

When beginning with the OpenArena benchmark, the LLVMpipe driver allows the ioquake3-powered first person shooter to run at 75 FPS... at 640 x 480. At 1280 x 1024 on LLVMpipe the game is churning out an average of 35 FPS while at 1920 x 1080 it is only putting out 25 FPS. While these numbers seem low, it is the best I have seen yet out of any Intel or AMD CPU with handling the LLVMpipe software rasterizer. Meanwhile, the low-end Radeon HD 5450 Evergreen GPU with the Catalyst blob was many times faster.