SwiftShader 2.0: A DX9 Software Rasterizer that runs Crysis
Friday 04th April 2008, 12:00:00 AM, written by Arun
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.
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