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Google has today opened up SwiftShader, a software library for high-performance graphics rendering on the CPU.

It's a pretty nice bit of tech looking at the example they showed:
image
GoogleChrome running without SwiftShader on a machine with an inadequate GPU (left) cannot run the WebGL Globe experiment. The same machine with SwiftShader enabled (right) is able to fully render the content.


Google has been using it since 2009, so that's quite a while for it to be closed source, but great to see them eventually open it up.

Find out more on their blog here. See their git here where it's under the Apache license.

Anyone planning to tinker with it? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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3 comments

dubigrasu Jun 29, 2016
Is this the same Swiftshader from Transgaming?
Avehicle7887 Jun 29, 2016
Is this the same Swiftshader from Transgaming?

Hmm I think it is, according to a line from their github page:

The SwiftShader libraries act as drop-in replacements for graphics drivers.

On Windows, most applications can be made to use SwiftShader's DLLs by placing them in the same folder as the executable. On Linux, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable or -rpath linker option can be used to direct applications to search for shared libraries in the indicated directory first.

Seems to describe the Transgaming SwiftShader perfectly. I used it quite a few times (when I used Windows) just for testing but the huge logo didn't give a good experience, felt like playing a tech demo. If this thing comes to Linux I might be interested in testing this.


Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 29 June 2016 at 8:09 pm UTC
dubigrasu Jun 29, 2016
Seems to describe the Transgaming SwiftShader perfectly. I used it quite a few times (when I used Windows) just for testing but the huge logo didn't give a good experience, felt like playing a tech demo. If this thing comes to Linux I might be interested in testing this.

Indeed, by googling around I see that is made by the same person, only this being a newer version.
The logo wasn't a real problem at higher resolutions (it wasn't scaled to match), but then again, at higher resolution the whole thing crawled to a halt, so hm...
Personally I did't had too much success with it, it did worked yes, but it wasn't such a awesome workaround as I hoped it would be.
Let's see with this one.
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