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It’s been 5+ years since I worked in it, but the well-tuned version of openswr.com was competitive with discrete HW, ca., 2012. This isn’t “rasterization in a day”; it’s more like “a team of professionals over 18 months” who had done two prior rasterizers on Larrrabee, including working directly with Mike Abrash & co.

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You mean http://openswr.org

That's impressive. In some synthetic scenes or actual applications?

I think careful and elaborate design and scalability can get you a long way, but the thing is, without relaxing some API rules (e.g. rasterization order) which makes a rasterizer robust, you're gonna have difficulty keeping up with HW eventually.

We started with Quake III, Minecraft, etc. and were able to maintain "game play FPS" (800+), but nothing like a high end discrete card. Where SWR really shined was on high end HPC visualization software, where discrete cards (if they didn't crash/hang) could only maintain 1-2 FPS. SWR could get 12-17 FPS. Such applications are strongly bandwidth limited.

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