Zink Can Now Run On Lavapipe But You Really Want To Avoid It

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink Can Now Run On Lavapipe But You Really Want To Avoid It

In addition to this week seeing Zink now running on NVIDIA's proprietary driver for supporting this Gallium3D-based OpenGL over Vulkan implementation, it can now run on top of Lavapipe as the CPU-based Vulkan implementation. But for end-users that is really something you would want to avoid...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-On-Lavapipe-Patch

[Aryma]

i would like to see this windows as DLL just like wine and mesa

[kpedersen]

Lavapipe could also be useful for debugging when you see two results from different vendors, and you don't know which one is correct
And also really useful on Virtual Machines which do not have direct access to GPU hardware. LLVMpipe has been fantastically useful.

[CommunityMember]

Lavapipe could also be useful for debugging when you see two results from different vendors, and you don't know which one is correct

Of course, with lavapipe as a third implementation you could end up with three different results......

[kpedersen]

Of course, with lavapipe as a third implementation you could end up with three different results......

Hah, very true. But at least then you *know* they are out to get you

[ptrwis]

Can they make use of SSE or AVX instructions?

[emblemparade]

Hm, I dunno, with consumer CPUs now coming with 64 cores / 128 threads ... it might give a not-entirely-awful experience. Sounds nutty, but a system like that could be useful for developers who want to work with various graphics APIs while removing GPU hardware and drivers from the equation.

[Aryma]

it will be enough for mpv player or some emulator

[coder]

Hm, I dunno, with consumer CPUs now coming with 64 cores / 128 threads ... it might give a not-entirely-awful experience.

You seem to have a very flexible definition of a "consumer CPU". I regard consumer = mainstream platform, which maxes out at 16 cores for AMD and 10 cores for Intel. List price for a 64-core Threadripper is about $4k, and that's not counting the expensive motherboard or the big cooler & PSU that you'd need for it.

Semantics aside, he certainly tested llvmpipe on bigger CPUs and found it doesn't scale well. Here are some of the more recent tests:

• https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...ium3D-LLVMpipe
• https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa....0-Performance

Maybe lavapipe is better, but since it's based on llvmpipe, I wouldn't count on it.

Anyway, Intel's failed Larabee project looked at rendering performance on a massively multi-core x86 CPU. Even with hardware-accelerated texture lookups, it wasn't competitive.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrab...roarchitecture)

After several further iterations (about 5, the first 3 of which never got released, and probably a 6th on the drawing board, not counting Knights Mill), they finally concluded it couldn't even compete with GPUs at raw compute, which is like a CPU's home territory.

Finally, consider that a modern GPU also has hardware acceleration for other things, like rasterization and tessellation. So, even if llvmpipe scaled better than it currently does, you'd still be better off with a sub-$150 GPU.

[emblemparade]

You seem to have a very flexible definition of a "consumer CPU".

It means targeted at consumers, as opposed to, say, a supercomputer. You can go into a store and buy a Threadripper.

Finally, consider that a modern GPU also has hardware acceleration for other things, like rasterization and tessellation. So, even if llvmpipe scaled better than it currently does, you'd still be better off with a sub-$150 GPU.

I don't know why you ignored the rest of my post. At no point did I say that it would offer reasonable performance for normal use cases. I talked about a very specific developer use case that exactly wants to bypass GPUs and be able to debug the entire stack in code. By the way, Threadripper is also great for software compilation and is actually a reasonable product to buy for developers in this field.