Intel graphics - it's the SW not the HW [LWN.net]

Intel graphics - it's the SW not the HW

Posted Jul 25, 2012 13:16 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
In reply to: Romanick: The zombies cometh... by slashdot
Parent article: Romanick: The zombies cometh...

So, I think the thing everyone seems to forget about graphics hardware is that a HUGE part of performance and features is based on the software stack they have running over the top of them. And these software stacks are extremely complex, including things like sophisticated memory management and JIT compilers for shaders.

NVidia and AMD have been evolving their software for probably over a decade now. They support multiple versions of both DirectX and OpenGL, all on the same basic hardware.

Intel on the other hand, doesn't have any of that software (that I'm aware of). They are essentially open sourcing their hardware and pushing the development of the open source software stack (Mesa, Gallium/LLVM, etc) as the preferred software solution for their hardware (at least on Linux).

So, while I expect Intel could build a piece of hardware that performs better at a hardware level than AMD/Nvidia could, by dint of their process superiority, the software side of things is still several (3-5?) years behind. As a result, they'd probably still lag behind significantly in performance. And all the spiffy hardware in the world won't fix that.

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Intel graphics - it's the SW not the HW

Posted Jul 25, 2012 13:41 UTC (Wed) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]

> Intel doesn't use Gallium3D or LLVM. They're developing shader compiler essentially from scratch.

Ah, irony. The biggest open source contributor to the graphic subsystem and the one with the most updated drivers is developing against the older (hopefully one day deprecated) graphic stack.

Intel graphics - it's the SW not the HW

Posted Jul 25, 2012 20:10 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

> Intel doesn't use Gallium3D or LLVM. They're developing shader compiler essentially from scratch.

Which makes my point even more valid. The SW stack running over the top of the Intel hardware is basically 3-5 years (at least) behind Nvidia/AMD. So regardless of how good a graphics card Intel actually does make, the SW is just not there to support it.

Intel graphics - it's the SW not the HW

Posted Jul 25, 2012 20:55 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

That's not entirely correct. Intel was the main driving force behind the push to OpenGL 3 compatibility. They've started the shader compiler rewrite, this compiler is actually shared between the "classic" Mesa and Gallium3D.

So the situation is much more nuanced and complex than you think :)

Intel graphics - it's the SW not the HW

Posted Jul 28, 2012 16:43 UTC (Sat) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]

> The SW stack running over the top of the Intel hardware is basically 3-5 years (at least) behind Nvidia/AMD.

Actually, Intel uses a stack with an older *base* than AMD/Nouveau, but the Intel stack is still way more *polished*, and therefore currently offers better hw utilization than the AMD and Nouveau drivers. Of course, the Intel hw is so much slower than AMD and Nvidia hw, that they still loose all benchmarks, despite their better drivers.

However, this gap in polish is slowly shrinking as Gallium improves, and all new mesa state trackers (ie OpenVG, OpenCL, d3d1x, xorg, vdpau, etc) requires way more work to implement in Intel drivers, so sooner or later Intel will have to switch to Gallium if they want to keep up...