Gallium3D LLVMpipe Compared To Nine Graphics Cards

Yesterday after publishing the 15-way open-source vs. closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics comparison there were some requests by Phoronix readers to also show how the LLVMpipe software rasterizer performance is in reference. For this article to end out the month are the OpenGL performance results from nine lower-end AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards running with their respective Mesa/Gallium3D drivers compared to the LLVMpipe software driver in two configurations.

The open-source graphics card tests were with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT, 9500GT, 9600GSO, GT 220, and GT 520. On the open-source AMD side were the Radeon HD 5750, HD 6450, HD 6570, and HD 6770. These results are from the earlier testing while the new numbers are the LLVMpipe data points.

LLVMpipe was tested on the same hardware/software stack as earlier. The system was powered by an AMD FX-8350 "Vishera" processor with 8GB of RAM and was running Ubuntu 13.04. For the LLVMpipe results on the following pages, the "LLVMpipe - LLVM 3.2" numbers are for using LLVM 3.2 stable in conjunction with Mesa 9.2 git-cb12bf7, the same Mesa Git revision used for the NVIDIA/AMD testing. With the "LLVMpipe - LLVM 3.3" results are software numbers when using the LLVM 3.3 SVN code-base for the very latest snapshot of the compiler infrastructure. Additionally, the LLVMpipe driver was pulled from the very latest Git source of yesterday as git-51e9bfd.

Recent Phoronix testing has found that Gallium3D's LLVMpipe driver is now much faster so these results should be interesting to see how the performance compares to various NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards on their respective Gallium3D drivers.