Running Gallium3D's LLVMpipe On The Eight-Core 5GHz CPU

Having an eight-core CPU that can clock up to 5.0GHz (albeit having a 220 Watt TDP), curiosity got the best of me to run some quick (or slow) Gallium3D LLVMpipe tests just to see how this software fall-back driver performs.

While LLVMpipe is intended for driver developers as a hardware-neutral code-path for debugging and a technical exercise for those learning about OpenGL and drivers, it's being increasingly used as a fall-back driver for modern Linux desktop environments in the case of no hardware OpenGL acceleration. It's good enough for some basic desktop use if you have a decent desktop CPU, but still obviously meant for gaming. Just for kicks I decided to see how well it would do with the AMD FX-9590 processor with its eight cores (four Piledriver modules) that have a 4.7GHz base clock frequency and 5.0GHz turbo frequency.

First up, in case you missed it, LLVMpipe finally supports OpenGL 3.3 in software though its GL4 support is lagging behind along with the other software drivers.

For these silly OpenGL LLVMpipe tests, Mesa 10.4-devel was in use on the AMD FX-9590 system with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

LLVMpipe can run the very poor OpenArena game at almost 30 FPS... At 1280 x 1024, for this eight-core 5.0GHz CPU.

At 1920 x 1080 for this old id Tech 3 game, the average frame-rate is only about 15 FPS.

Those wanting to look at the rest of these FX-9590 LLVMpipe benchmarks for kicks can visit the OpenBenchmarking.org result file.