Gallium3D LLVMpipe Driver On LLVM 3.1

LLVM 3.1 is set to be released next month but will it offer up any performance improvements when paired with the open-source Mesa Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver for CPU-based OpenGL support? Here's some new benchmarks that were conducted over the weekend.

Among other features, LLVM has improved Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge support and initial support for Intel Haswell CPUs. There's many other improvements too, which will be examined in forthcoming articles. Right now the only LLVM 3.1 benchmarks published up to this point have been LLVM/Clang 3.1 Sandy Bridge test results. In this article are some LLVMpipe benchmarks when paired with LLVM 3.1 and Mesa 8.1-devel (Mesa Git master) from Easter.

This quick testing was just comparing the performance of LLVMpipe of LLVM 3.1 SVN and LLVM 3.0 stable. The CPU being used this time was the AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer eight-core processor. This LLVMpipe/LLVM testing was being done from an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x86_64 host.

If you were hoping an upgrade to LLVM 3.1 would improve the LLVMpipe numbers, it unfortunately doesn't appear that way, at least for AMD's latest CPU architecture.

These results continue on OpenBenchmarking.org.