DragonEgg-ing Mesa & Banging It With Clang

As LLVM/Clang/DragonEgg can produce faster binaries than GCC for many programs as previous Phoronix benchmarks have shown, if you were hoping using a different compiler would magically speed-up Mesa, sadly it does not. There are bottlenecks elsewhere holding back the OpenGL performance. I carried out some benchmarks when building Mesa with LLVMpipe under GCC 4.6.2, GCC 4.6.2 with DragonEgg 3.0, and when using LLVM/Clang 3.0.

The LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver was used since it is CPU-based and the most computationally intensive driver, but even here, switching out GCC for another compiler hadn't improved the graphics performance. The test system was an Intel Core i7 990X Extreme Edition setup.

Switching from GCC to LLVM/Clang/DragonEgg is sadly no magic bullet for enhancing Mesa's performance.