sketchy vulkan benchmarks: lavapipe vs swiftshader

 Mike, the zink dev, mentioned that swiftshader seemed slow at some stuff and I realised I've never expended much effort in checking swiftshader vs llvmpipe in benchmarks.

The thing is CPU rendering is pretty much going to top out on memory bandwidth pretty quickly but I decided to do some rough napkin benchmarks using the vulkan samples from Sascha Willems.

I'd also thought that due to having a few devs and the fact that it was used instead of mesa by google for lots of things that llvmpipe would be slower since it hasn't really gotten dedicated development resources.

I picked a random smattering of Vulkan samples and ran them on my Ryzen 

workstation without doing anything else, in their default window size.

The first number is lavapipe fps the second swiftshader.

  • gears: 336 309
  • instancing: 3 3
  • ssao: 19 9
  • deferredmultisampling:  11 4
  • computeparticles: 9 8
  • computeshader: 73 57
  • computeshader sharpen: 54 34

I guess the swift is just good marketing name, now I'm not sure why llvmpipe/lavapipe isn't more of a development target for those devs, imagine how much better it could be if it has fulltime dedicate devs on it.

Comments

  1. Anonymous26 March 2021 at 20:18

    Thanks for the comparison! Excellent results!

    Quick question, does Lavapipe make use of 256-bit vector instructions?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dave Airlie4 April 2021 at 19:40

      yes llvmpipe underneath uses avx2 where available. otherwise it uses 128-bit.

      Delete
  2. monstercameron1 April 2021 at 06:22

    how many cores can this scale to?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dave Airlie4 April 2021 at 19:41

      I think most of the scaling problems seem to be more memory bandwidth related. It currently is missing some code to allow it to better saturate cores though so parts of it scale up well but then it goes single threaded for a while to do vertex/geometry/tessellation processing.

      Delete

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