LLVMpipe Still Is Slow At Running OpenGL On The CPU

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 29 June 2010 at 08:57 AM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 35 Comments.

Again, LLVMpipe's performance struggled with Urban Terror.

LLVMpipe is still actively being worked on and has seen numerous changes since our original tests back in April -- even just last week the geometry shaders and stream output were made to work with it -- but still this is not an effective solution for being able to play even ioquake3-based games on the CPU. LLVMpipe is faster though than Mesa's old software rasterizer, but still it and LLVM will need more optimizations before it can play any games at a brisk pace. Once this Gallium3D software driver supports the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension for Compiz / GNOME Shell support, hopefully though it should be fast enough to keep up with compositing window managers on the CPU. Of course, we will continue to monitor the performance of LLVMpipe and may even start benchmarking it on a daily or per-commit basis using Phoromatic as we do with the Linux kernel.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.