MSAA Support Added To The OpenSWR Software Rasterizer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: MSAA Support Added To The OpenSWR Software Rasterizer

Intel's OpenSWR graphics software rasterizer living within Mesa now has experimental support for MSAA...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenSWR-Gets-MSAA

[eydee]

The good thing about software rasterizers is that you can just add resource intensive features like MSAA, and the performance difference will be negligible. You go from 0 fps to 0 fps. Just can't tell the difference.

[devius]

Looking forward to a prettier slideshow.

[bachchain]

Maybe someone could elaborate on who these customers are

[coder]

The good thing about software rasterizers is that you can just add resource intensive features like MSAA, and the performance difference will be negligible. You go from 0 fps to 0 fps. Just can't tell the difference.

Not if the CPU you're running it on is a Xeon Phi. Intel could just make a half-decent GPU of it, yet!

[starshipeleven]

Maybe someone could elaborate on who these customers are

it's used by research projects to render the result of simulations. http://openswr.org/gallery.html

It's not a real-time rendering, probably, but it seems it is more flexible than GPUs and can be run on the same computing node that ran the simulation (that you must have anyway).

[coder]

it's used by research projects to render the result of simulations. http://openswr.org/gallery.html

It's not a real-time rendering, probably, but it seems it is more flexible than GPUs and can be run on the same computing node that ran the simulation (that you must have anyway).

In all seriousness, I figured it's probably used for screenshots and making HQ non-realtime renders, as you say.

And before someone takes my earlier suggestion too seriously, I'll note that Xeon Phi would never make a cost-effective GPU, in part due to the overhead of the x86 frontend. Perhaps more significant are the stronger memory consistency guarantees than those to which GPUs are subjected.

But if we don't care about cost, then I'll bet you could get performance somewhere in the ballpark of a GTX 1070. And even better, if we're talking about raytracing.

[ldo17]

In all seriousness, I figured it's probably used for screenshots and making HQ non-realtime renders, as you say.

I wouldn’t call that “high-quality”. “High-quality” is done with offline renderers with the full panoply of lighting and shadow effects, like Blender Cycles.

[coder]

I wouldn’t call that “high-quality”. “High-quality” is done with offline renderers with the full panoply of lighting and shadow effects, like Blender Cycles.

I meant that in a relative sense. This is about MSAA, so that's better quality than you'd typically use for interactive visualization (although I've been known to crank up FSAA on some old games...).

[torowley]

OpenSWR is targeted towards interactive usage with visualization workloads (very high geometry loads), though it can be used for anything else people might do with OpenGL.

Image quality is just limited by the creativity of the OpenGL programmer, identical to hardware accelerated versions. For those interested in higher quality images, our group at Intel also makes available opensource libraries for building high performance raytracers (Embree) and an interactive visualization focused high-level library (OSPRay). For some workloads, notably direct volume rendering and very large static geometry, the performance of these libraries is better than even GPU accelerated techniques.