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

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.

Comments

How does it compare to a low-end graphics card?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No, it's not for playing games

[CajunArson]

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.