Gallium3D's LLVMpipe Is Speeding Up

The Qfusion-powered Warsow game was 18% faster with the Mesa 7.10/7.11 LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver, but still it is not good enough for producing a playable experience.

Lastly, with VDrift, which is the most demanding test in this article for running off LLVMpipe, the performance is up by an incredible 67%. If running the traditional Mesa Software Rasterizer, you would have a hard time topping one frame per second.

LLVMpipe in Mesa 7.10 has certainly sped up and is much, much faster than in Mesa 7.9.1, but it is still not good enough if you expect to use it to run any games or other intensive OpenGL applications. It does, however, provide greater hope that LLVMpipe will become suitable for less-demanding applications where OpenGL is still needed, such as with basic WebGL content, desktop compositing (but there's still no GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support for LLVMpipe), and other areas. There may also be more potential for the LLVMpipe driver with other Gallium3D state trackers, such as with OpenVG and OpenGL ES or the Xorg state tracker for accelerating 2D EXA on the CPU, and other less brutal areas than OpenGL. By the time Mesa 7.11 is actually ready in a few months, hopefully there will be more performance improvements to note. The next step will be to see LLVMpipe dislodge the classic Mesa software rasterizer in the major Linux distributions for use in scenarios where an actual GPU driver is not available or working.