Universal rendering with SwiftShader, now open source | Hacker News Reader

Universal rendering with SwiftShader, now open source

blog.chromium.org

63 pointsingve27 comments

I assume this is the technology from TransGaming [1] (famous for their closed-source wine fork cedega). Did Google acquire them? Couldnt find anything on how this came to happen, and nowhere in the the announcement or the repo do they mention hiw this came to be.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/97847/Transgaming_Launche...

edit: http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/transgaming-and-googl... - one hell of a license that must be...

> one hell of a license that must be...

Probably something like when Amazon bought CryEngine license from Crytek and then released it for free as Lumberyard (including releasing source code, though not true open source).

The price for such "do whatever you want" license for CryEngine was supposed to be in $50M-70M range and basically rescued Crytek from bankrupcy (SwiftShader would be obviously much cheaper).

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Ok, managed to find the SwiftShader price (includes TransGaming patents, licensed know-how and licensed intellectual property) - it was $1.25M, announced April 20, 2016:

http://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2016-05-04/transgami...

Part of Transgaming was acquired by Google, specifically the team working on ANGLE. This happened a couple years ago. Originally Google was funding Transgamings work on ANGLE.

Then Transgaming did an SwiftShader license to Google.

And then much of the remaining Transgaming CG software expertise was sold to NVIDIA.

Transgaming was approached by intel to use the technology to bring gaming to smart tvs around 2010. They went all in on smart tv gaming. The product did not take off and they have been doing very poorly financially, selling all IP (swiftshader apparently to google), the wine-fork to nvidia. They have now announced they are becoming a real-estate company.

Press release: http://www.transgaming.com/transgaming-proposes-change-of-bu...

They're going to be a phenomenal "real estate financing" company, what with a current market capitalization of <$3M.

It sounds like this has some parallels to Mesa's Gallium llvmpipe. (Both projects aim to render some version of OpenGL on the CPU.) Does anyone more familiar with either project know how much those goals overlap and if opportunities for code sharing exist?

It also seems to have parallels to Apple's OpenGL implementation which, if the hardware doesn't support the required functionality, falls back to software rendering. It uses LLVM to dynamically generate machine code.

It's also dead slow (obviously).

Notably, that was a very early use of LLVM, before LLVM was well known, wasn't it? Mid 2000s?

Has nothing to do with the Swift language from Apple. Is not on Github.

(Saved some of you 1-2 clicks)

Why does it matter that it's not on github? There's an open repo - https://swiftshader.googlesource.com/SwiftShader - along with clear contribution instructions.

The insistence that all projects use git/github annoys me to no end.

Saving clicks, some (me) look at Github first before reading the website completely. Bad habit. I know, sorry.

While I agree that not all projects need to be on github (or in git), it is useful to have a centralized hub for finding open source projects your interested in and want to follow the development of said projects.

Like Sourceforge the last darling from FOSS before git and mercurial took off?

I'm struggling to think of a CPU in the Venn intersection of "fast enough to run SwiftShader without giving the impression of a locked up system" and "does not come with a form of integrated GPU".

It's not the CPU as much as the drivers. I have an 6yr old laptop which runs Windows 7 just fine but the graphics drivers are blacklisted and crash the machine if used.

Would a CPU rendering stack allow for better debugging? I'd love to be able to log to the console from my shaders.

I remember the predecessor to swiftshader being open source, then it moved to Transgaming and the open source version webpages all disappeared. It was rather a shame because it had some excellent articles on rasterising triangles that went with it.

I also have some vague recollection of a sourceforge project with a car viewable from all angles in a demo. The library was DirectX 7 or 8 compatible at that time, I think.

You probably mean swShader and Nicolas Capens's articles on Advanced Rasterization.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sw-shader/

http://forum.devmaster.net/t/advanced-rasterization/6145

Excellent series, even if it surpassed by ryg's more complete series on modern triangle rasterization.

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/optimizing-sw-occlu...

How does this compare to mesa3d?

I've never figured out how to enable SwiftShader. I have windows 10 installed in a VM with no GPU support and when I try to run chrome it says WebGL isn't available. (But funny thing Firefox works, albeit really slowly.)

Confuses me.

It'd be interesting to see this merged into mesa, for some comparisons against its three(!) different CPU renderers (llvmpipe, softpipe, and OpenSWR).

gees, even my $9 C.H.I.P supports OpenGL (ES). Talk about historyware.

You'd be amazed how many browser users have broken unusable drivers, especially on Windows XP. Even if newer drivers are available, trying to instruct those users how to upgrade is a nonstarter. It's sad, but that's the world we live in.

Chrome maintains a GPU blacklist of drivers and GPUs that it will not run WebGL on. According to [0], even hybrid Nvidia/Intel setups are excluded. So I wouldn't be surprised if there are many people with GPUs that "support" OpenGL ES but are buggy enough to be blacklisted.

[0] https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists

Okay so you're targeting a userbase of clueless boomers who can't be bothered to upgrade or go into chrome://flags or about:config. Fine. It's time to move on. Encouraging the continued use of a stone age endpoint is regressive. Fixing this is a single search away and can be pointed out easily to said users on a landing page. We have to start using the parallel silicon present in all our devices. It even makes sense ecologically.

> Okay so you're targeting a userbase of clueless boomers who can't be bothered to upgrade or go into chrome://flags or about:config

The blacklisting is often for security reasons. I would strongly advise against browsing arbitrary websites with the blacklist overridden.

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