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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.

3 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. How does it compare to a low-end graphics card? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's the really interesting question, since on board graphics just tend to work nowadays and the only real use case of such software for a consumer is as a fall back for when it doesn't and in that case the fancy graphics tend to get turned off anyway.

  2. Holy shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    the comments on this story pretty much put the nail in the coffin for this website. News for nerds? Not based on the replies of people who think this is for desktops. Seriously, what the fuck?

  3. Re:Up to by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Then it should have just said "up to 51x faster" ... or more ...

    "Up to" is just a weasel word way of saying "less than".

    I have up to a billion dollars in my pocket.