OpenSWR High-Performance Software Rasterizer Revised For Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenSWR High-Performance Software Rasterizer Revised For Mesa

Intel engineers have put out their latest OpenSWR patch series for providing Mesa with a high-performance, scalable software rasterizer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenSWR-High-Perf-Mesa

[rabcor]

Can someone explain to me what this Software Rasterizer is supposed to do? I'm familiar with the concept of Raster vs Vector graphics (Big fan of PNG and SVG formats even) and know the differences, but I can not understand what a "rasterizer" would do other than converting other graphic types to raster format... Is that what it does?

I mean... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterisation

[Michael]

Can someone explain to me what this Software Rasterizer is supposed to do? I'm familiar with the concept of Raster vs Vector graphics (Big fan of PNG and SVG formats even) and know the differences, but I can not understand what a "rasterizer" would do other than converting other graphic types to raster format... Is that what it does?

I mean... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterisation

It's basically an OpenGL graphics driver running on the CPU, similar to LLVMpipe, and not relying upon a GPU for rendering.

[gamerk2]

It's basically just doing OpenGL entirely on the CPU.

[rabcor]

Oh I see, I'm surprised we didn't already have that.

[agd5f]

Oh I see, I'm surprised we didn't already have that.

We do, we actually have 3 of them already (swrast, softpipe, llvmpipe).

[rabcor]

Ah I see, well it's kinda essential to have so I had hoped that this was the case. I guess Intel are just trying to do better then. High performance software renderer would indeed be nice.

[liam]

We do, we actually have 3 of them already (swrast, softpipe, llvmpipe).

Pixman as well, but maybe that's not quite the same as it doesn't take gl commands?

[smitty3268]

Ah I see, well it's kinda essential to have so I had hoped that this was the case. I guess Intel are just trying to do better then. High performance software renderer would indeed be nice.

According to the docs https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...ry/108133.html it's primarily targeting VTK applications.

I know there was some testing, and it seemed like llvmpipe was generally faster in typical games, but swr has some large benefits for other types of workloads that aren't as fragment shader bound.

[mazumoto]

Amazing. It's intel and they implemented it on gallium and use gallivm/llvm.