TransGaming Releases Fast Software 3D Rendering

gavriels writes "TransGaming has just released SwiftShader, an ultra-fast software-only 3D renderer that supports Vertex and Pixel Shaders. SwiftShader dynamically compiles the geometry and rasterization pipelines to produce code that exactly matches the graphics features a game or application is using. Demo download and tech details can be found on their website."

Desktop Environments

[taskforce]

If this can do what it's boasting it will certainly come in handy for Graphic heavy desktop environments such as the Aero Glass Theme Windows Vista is using. If a Linux GUI (ho ho ho) can provide an experience as rich as Aqua or Aero and base it on this software rendering it could make leaps and bounds on the desktop as more savvy system admins decline to purchase the latest gaming card so they can run Vista.

Obviously I realise that a lot more is needed before desktop Linux taxes off, but if someone could capitalise on this we could have a decent GUI utilised without pissing all over Linux's reputation for not taxing hardware too heavily. (Personally I prefer an understated GUI which uses no resources, but obviously there is a market for eye candy.)

Re:The Meat...

[MindStalker]

What I really want to know is can it use the 3D capabilities of your card while software rendering the things your card doesn't support. This would be the killer app for Linux and Windows.

Load balancing?

[iammaxus]

Can it split the rendering load between your GPU and your CPU if your GPU is capable of some of these features? I couldn't find an answer on their website.

Re:The Point

[Surt]

For developers, this can be very useful, particularly if they can get it up to date on the newer pixel and vertex shaders for the simple reason that running your application on the real hardware can nuke your system, and running in the existing microsoft renderer is painfully slow. This could provide a useful compromise.

possible deathknell for lowend non-integrated gfx

[l33t-gu3lph1t3]

Believe it or not, but integrated graphics hold the lion's share of the PC graphics market. Nvidia and Ati are both pretty far behind Intel in terms of install base. This could be very bad for the other vendors: the main reason for the popularity of integrated graphics is cost - Intel itself only holds about a $5 premium on gfx-enabled chipsets over discrete chipsets.

What happens when Microsoft licenses this tech and integrates it into Windows? Suddenly, all anyone needs is a RAMDAC to output framebuffer to VGA, so Intel doesn't need to develop GPUs anymore, and overnight gets a massive performance boost and full DX9 support....

So, how about some numbers?

[Lendrick]

Anyone have time to, say, download this driver and fire up UT2004 or somesuch and test the framerate using software rendering vs their 3d card (with all other settings being equal)? Of course, this wouldn't be particularly scientific, but it would at least give some idea about how well this thing performs and whether it's useful.

Re:Ads

[hardaker]

How about we call the new section "slashmeat"? And then we can set up a web interface to post to slashdot and freshmeat at the same time! Two birds and all...

Re:The Point

[Anonymous Coward]

For developers, this can be very useful, particularly if they can get it up to date on the newer pixel and vertex shaders for the simple reason that running your application on the real hardware can nuke your system

My point is that I don't see DX9 features as being something that casual gamers need or want. Most of the pixel shader stuff is for high quality 3D scenes. Perfect for a First Person Shooter, but an extreme overkill for 3D Space Invaders. (Do we REALLY need aliens with realistic fur that whips in the wind as they make their slow approach toward the ground?)

A game that is targeted at the Casual Gaming Market should aim to meet the expected 3D Card support instead of wasting time on Gee Whiz Bang features that will do little else other than cause complaints about slow performance.

What I want to know...

[deathy_epl+ccs]

...is what demogroup they were before they went commercial, because that's the only crowd I can see with the drive and desire to create something like this. One of my group's coders still gets a stiffy for software rendering, and I know he's not the only demoscener that does.

Re:Ads

[gavriels]

Actually, they already changed it. I wrote 'here', not 'on their website'.

  -Gav

Re:Desktop Environments

[DrCode]

Isn't this a commercial product? It's hard to see how any Linux distribution could be based on this.

What I'd Like To Know

[ThePyro]

Can it take advantage of multiple processors?

For years, some analysts claimed that ordinary processors would eventually obsolete 3D accelerators, because they would be fast enough to handle all of the rendering in software. Since graphics processing can usually make pretty good use of parallelism, then perhaps a package like this along with multiple CPUs is the "wave of the future"?

Obviously not now... but in 20 years?

swShader?

[ravyne]

I wonder if this is possibly a take off of an open source project called swShader (its on source forge.) I've had some contact with the author of swShader, Nicholas Cappens(spelling likely incorrect), we discussed the unique approach he has taken to polygon filling/texturing. swShader also has DX 8 & 9 interfaces and a dll which could stand in to interface with regular DirectX games. While its an interesting piece of work, I hate to see when an OSS project, particularly one with one primary author(the owner if you will) gets taken and then commercialized becuae I'm sure he'll never see a penny, despite having written most of it. I don't know that thats the case here or not, but I hope it isn't. I guess its part of the deal when you open it up to OSS but it would still stink. Then again, maybe he's commercialized it himself or got hired to produce it, which I would be all for.

Re:The Meat...

[JacobO]

This sounds very much like Pixomatic [radgametools.com], courtesy of Michael Abrash [wikipedia.org].

The DX9 featureset appears to be the big win here, unless of course you consider Linux support important :-)

Maybe something, but not all

[Sycraft-fu]

Vertex shaders, sure. In fact, DirectX does just that. If you lack hardware vertex shaders, DirectX will happily do them in software. It's not as fast, of course, since it hits your CPU, but it works. However other things can't be done, at least not yeat. Pixel shaders would be an example. They are later in the chain, after the graphics card has done it's work, even if it's a simple one. So that either requires doing it all in software, or sending data from the graphics card back to the CPU, doing more work, then back to the graphics card.

With AGP it's right out. PCIe makes it a remote possibility, the bus would work, but it's still not a real solution. It would end up being too slow to matter. The thing is you can get a cheap 3d card that WILL do it, though slow (any Radeon 9200 or above), but faster than software.

So I don't know about killer app. Certianly not for Windows. As it stands, DirectX does this to the extent that it's useful. Things that can be done in software to a reasonable speed will be, if necessary. Things that can't are simply excluded. It's probably the best compramise from a consumer standpoint.

back in the day...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when pci was vogue, and the pentium was king(in X86 land) video cards had VRAM, and you were lucky to have more than 1MEG. After all 1024x768x24bit is about ~3.8 meg so these werent even capable of full SVGA at 24bit. But if you were lucky they worked ok at 640x480@24bit = ~921k ... ;) Even a 386 supported linear frame buffers in protected mode. This was used in games such as Zone66, which was incredibly fast, and required you to boot into the game, where it ran exclusively in protected mode, an optimization not available today under XP, where we have "update available" or "disk is low on space" popping up constantly even when playing a full screen game like doom3.

anyway, my point (sorry). IIRC the whole point of VRam was that it was dual ported, ie the arrangement of gates/junctions that make up the memory cell allowed the memory to be accessed both by the PCI bus or DMA controller, and the DAC's on the video card _at_ _the_ _same_ _time_ !11

It would be interesting to understand how the current state of the art compares. I believe DDR3 wraps the clock wire around twice to double the clock speed or some trick (remember all those RamBus patient battles?). Have we come in a cycle , like with parallel/serial buses used in disk storage, with RAM not having architectural embelishments in the latest itterations but rather running faster due to a more basic stripped down design? Or does sophistication increase monotonically? Nah, dont think so d:D

Re:Swiftshader in hardware?

[c0d1f1ed]

Actually shaders as used on graphics hardware and the dynamically generated code used by SwiftShader share a lot of resemblance. The biggest difference is that the GPU is designed specifically to run shader code, while to make it run on the CPU we need to translate it to MMX and SSE instructions. The GPU also has many more pipelines and dedicated texture samplers. Other than that there's a convergence in technology as graphics hardware gets more programmable and reuses the same units for different threads (i.e. unified architecture).

So, to answer your question more directly, I doubt that any of the technology used in SwiftShader can further improve hardware rendering performance. But I do see an evolution in CPU thread parallelism...

Re:Can I run Doom3 on this thing?

[c0d1f1ed]

There is no OpenGL interface yet, but I expect that Doom 3 will be nearly playable on a powerful CPU at low detail. Even shadows might be possible, because stenciling requires very little operations per pixel and MMX allows to process up to eight pixels in parallel.

Anyway, it's not our immediate goal to support the latest games. The people playing Doom 3 really know they need a powerful graphics card. But once it becomes feasible to run it on the CPU, we'll let you know...

Re:Better software acceleration? Who cares?

[c0d1f1ed]

Not all systems come with good hardware rendering. And even though an upgrade is relatively cheap, not everyone is willing to pay that price for casual gaming, tons of people don't know/care how to do a graphics card upgrade, and many systems simply can't be upgraded (laptops in particular). TransGaming is all about portability. Whether from Windows to Linux, Mac to PlayStation, hardware to software... I can hardly imagine a better company for releasing a product like SwiftShader.