SwiftShader 2.0: A DX9 Software Rasterizer that runs Crysis

Friday 04th April 2008, 12:00:00 AM, written by Arun

TransGaming has just released SwiftShader 2.0, an highly optimized software rasterizer that supports DX9 and Shader Model 2.0 and scales with multi-core processors. It can run (albeit slowly) many modern games and it makes a dual-core Penryn perform similarly to the GeForce FX5600/5700 in 3DMark05.

Nicolas Capens (aka Nick on our forums) is the creator and lead programmer behind SwiftShader - he started by writing the DX7/DX8 swShader many years ago, and eventually turned it into a commercial product in 2005 with the help of TransGaming and Gavriel State in particular.

A demo is now available on TransGaming's website, with which we ran 3DMark05 and obtained a score of ~400 on a stock Core 2 Duo E8400. That's still not mind-blowingly fast, but keep in mind Direct3D's reference rasterizer would likely score in the single digits and the SGX-based IGP in Intel's upcoming Silverthorne-based Menlow platform for UMPCs/MIDs is claimed to only score ~150. It would also be much more than enough to run Vista's Aero interface smoothly.

Finally, we were told SwiftShader would run Crysis in the mid-single digits at the lowest settings on Intel quad-core systems. Definitely not very playable yet, but that should make it clear SwiftShader is perfectly usable for casual games. We look forward to seeing how SwiftShader evolves in the future and how it will perform on future high-end CPUs such as Intel's Nehalem and AMD's Shanghai - certainly it might be a fun way to benchmark CPUs once in a while.


Discuss on the forums

Tagging

graphics ± swiftshader, software, rasterizer, 3dmark05, crysis

Related graphics News

Diving into Anti-Aliasing
Travelling in Style: Beyond3D's C++ AMP contest
Beyond Programmable Shading CS448s first slides available
Khronos release OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0
Mazatech release AmanithVG 4.0, supporting OpenVG 1.1
OpenGL 3.0 is here (finally)
[Analysis] TSMC 40G to deliver up to 3.76x the perf/mm^2 of 65G & Power Implications
Old News: AMD CTO resigns, NVIDIA CFO retires, DDR3 for MCP7A, S3, etc.
S3 launches DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400 GPUs
GPGPU and 3D luminaries join 3D graphics heavyweights