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Intel Develops Linux 'Software GPU' That's ~29-51x Faster (phoronix.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the harder-better-faster-stronger dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Intel is open-sourcing their work on creating a high-performance graphics software rasterizer that originally was developed for scientific visualizations. Intel is planning to integrate this new OpenSWR project with Mesa to deploy it on the Linux desktop as a faster software rasterizer than what's currently available (LLVMpipe). OpenSWR should be ideal for cases where there isn't a discrete GPU available or the drivers fail to function. This software rasterizer implements OpenGL 3.2 on Intel/AMD CPUs supporting AVX(2) (Sandy Bridge / Bulldozer and newer) while being 29~51x faster than LLVMpipe and the code is MIT licensed. The code prior to being integrated in Mesa is offered on GitHub.

2 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. No, it's not for playing games by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Despite the ignorance (or perhaps intentional clickbaityness) of the post, nobody at Intel expects this to replace a GPU to do regular graphics or play games. They haven't been investing big money in going from effectively zero GPU power in 2010 to beating AMD's best solutions in 2015 to replace it with a software gimmick now.

    This renderer is designed to do all kinds of graphical visualization that doesn't make sense to do with a traditional GPU, just like running POVRay or rendering complex images in scientific applications.

    It is NOT going to replace a real GPU for what a real GPU does.
    Nobody at Intel ever said it would replace a GPU.
    The Internet, however, isn't so smart.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  2. Massive Scientific Visualization by friedmud · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is seriously useful for massive scientific visualization... where raw rendering speed isn't always the bottleneck (but of course, faster is better).

    We do simulations on supercomputers that generate terabytes of output. You then have to use a smaller cluster (typically 1000-2000 processors) to read that data and generate visualizations of it (using software like Paraview ( http://www.paraview.org/ ) ). Those smaller clusters often don't have any graphics cards on the compute nodes at all... and we currently fall back to Mesa for rendering frames.

    If you're interested in what some of these visualizations look like... here's a video of some of our stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...