Lavapipe Keeps Tacking On Features, LLVMpipe Lands New Rasterizer With 2~3x Faster 2D

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation but recently has also been engaged in some of the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver work and related to that is the venerable LLVMpipe OpenGL Gallium3D driver. Needless to say, there's some interesting work happening.

One of the exciting LLVMpipe advancements to land this past week that was led by VMware is introducing a new linear rasterizer for LLVMpipe that is optimized for 2D rendering. This linear rasterizer is 2~3x faster for 2D workloads than the existing rasterizer in LLVMpipe but optimized just for 2D use-cases. Originally this rasterizer was spearheaded by VMware to be able to render the Windows 7 Aero interface and other Windows applications with low CPU utilization.

The idea for this now-merged rasterizer started a decade ago at VMware while this past week finally made it into Git for Mesa 21.3. See this merge request for the details on this improved rasterizer for 2D with LLVmpipe.

Meanwhile the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver this month has seen a number of new features added, including support for some newer extensions like EXT_line_rasterization, EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state, EXT_color_write_enable, KHR_timeline_semaphores, and more.

More details on these recent Mesa software implementation features can be found via Mike's blog.