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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. 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. 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.