LLVMpipe Now Exposes OpenGL 4.2 For GL On CPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LLVMpipe Now Exposes OpenGL 4.2 For GL On CPUs

It was just a few days ago that the LLVMpipe OpenGL software rasterizer within Mesa finally achieved OpenGL 4.0 support while today it has crossed both OpenGL 4.1 and 4.2 milestones...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVMpipe-OpenGL-4.2

[markg85]

In fact, when looking at https://mesamatrix.net/ you can see that just getting GL_ARB_robust_buffer_access_behavior in place makes llvmpipe OpenGL 4.4!
Then for OpenGL 4.5 there are 2 more extensions to do.
And for OpenGL 4.6 there are 2 more.

In total just 5 more extensions to be fully up to date with the latest OpenGL. That's very impressive!

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Is it? I mean... in which case does software rendering OpenGL make sense? Isn't that too slow anyway?

[starshipeleven]

Is it? I mean... in which case does software rendering OpenGL make sense? Isn't that too slow anyway?

it's useful only as a fallback for work applications (where actually seeing anything is enough to do conversions or migrate to something else) and very legacy stuff that isn't going to use OpenGL 4 anyway

[LinAGKar]

Except there are 11 items required for OpenGL ES 3.1.

[imirkin]

Except there are 11 items required for OpenGL ES 3.1.

With a handful of trivial exceptions, ES 3.1 is a subset of GL 4.3 or so. (It adds atomic exchange support for float images, primitive bounding box which can be a no-op impl, stuff like that.)

[Aryma]

this may work better than i965 for old 7gen ?

[Michael]

this may work better than i965 for old 7gen ?

No chance. Gen7 era CPUs would be worse with LLVMpipe than Gen7 GPUs.

[starshipeleven]

No chance. Gen7 era CPUs would be worse with LLVMpipe than Gen7 GPUs.

as a general rule, any CPU of any generation with LLVMpipe is worse than its own generation's GPUs.

[kpedersen]

as a general rule, any CPU of any generation with LLVMpipe is worse than its own generation's GPUs.

This obviously makes sense. However I would actually love to see a graph showing where a CPU does start to overtake GPU.

For example which generation CPU started to yield better performance than the GMA 945? We are surely able to see some crossover now. It would also be useful to see how far away we are from reaching modern GPU performance via a CPU.