Gallium3D LLVMpipe Performance In Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

For those curious about the current performance level of the LLVMpipe software-renderer OpenGL driver for Mesa's Gallium3D in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, here's some new benchmarks.

It's been a while since last running benchmarks of LLVMpipe so we were curious to see how it's doing out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu 14.04 has the Linux 3.13 kernel, LLVM 3.4, and Mesa 10.1 as the important software versions. Our LLVMpipe testing was done on an Intel Core i7 4770K (Haswell) system. To put the LLVMpipe performance into perspective were also various Mesa/Gallium3D benchmarks of NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics processors with their open-source drivers; those results were extracted from our recent 20-way Ubuntu 14.04 GPU comparison.

LLVMpipe on the Core i7 4770K was about half the speed of the GTX 460 / GT 610 graphics cards in their crippled states due to Nouveau's lack of re-clocking support.

Of course, LLVMpipe isn't meant for gaming but more as a means of a debugging aid to graphics driver and OpenGL developers, and for situations as a fallback driver for the desktop when no GPU/driver is working or present. We just like benchmarking LLVMpipe to see where things are at today with the performance of this CPU-based driver that leverages LLVM for greater efficiency and performance.