[Mesa-dev] The GL3.txt format

[Kenneth Graunke]

On Monday, August 25, 2014 12:05:07 AM Romain Failliot wrote:
> Some folks helped me and a lot of detection bug have been fixed!
> 
> I have a question though (for my own culture): what's with the swrast, the
> softpipe and the llvmpipe? Aren't they all software drivers? What's the
> difference between all of them?
> 
> Thanks you!

swrast is Mesa's original software rasterizer - the oldest of the three.  In addition to being a standalone software driver, it's also used for software fallbacks in the classic drivers (i915, i965, r100, r200, nouveau_vieux).

softpipe is newer - a Gallium based software rasterizer.  It has a lot more features than the old swrast.  It's not particularly fast, but is pretty simple in comparison to llvmpipe.

llvmpipe uses LLVM to compile shaders to native assembly, rather than using an interpreter.  As such, it's much faster than the other two.

At least, that's my understanding of the situation.

--Ken
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