
Introducing OpenSWR: High performance software rasterizer - Tsiolkovsky
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-October/097816.html
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thechao
I had a chance to work on the Larrabee software rasterizer, and felt that the
solution space for the core "picker" function was pretty well buttoned up.
However, a buddy of mine (a performance guy) really wanted to implement a
rasterizer. I'd always been told (while working on Larrabee) that a software
texture sampler would be way too slow.

Over the winter, my buddy wrote a rasterizer, and I wrote a texture unit. A
third friend of ours wanted to implement a threading model for an immediate
mode binning rasterizer. (The OpenSWR variant of the project mistakenly refers
to SWR as a tiled-rasterizer.) We combined all three projects and out popped
SWR.

When we starting getting really good numbers, i.e., being able to play large-
scale Quake III with decent numbers etc., the project sort of took on a life
of its own.

Looking at the code (a couple of years after I left Intel), I can see they've
had to scrub a lot of the implementation for release.

