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SwiftShader is TransGaming's pure software 3D renderer that supports features like vertex/pixel shaders, floating point rendering, and other DirectX 9.0 / OpenGL ES 2.0 level features. Adobe is hooking up with TransGaming so that developers targeting Flash and AIR can utilize 3D APIs (such as Direct3D and OpenGL) and those users that are without any 3D hardware/driver support will fall-back to SwiftShader for the software rendering in future versions of the Flash Player and AIR run-time. This is basically a proprietary CPU-based software renderer that Adobe is licensing from TransGaming. From the press release it sounds like Adobe is gearing up for pushing more 3D capabilities into Flash and AIR. While interesting, this will cause yet more work for those free software developers working on open-source implementations of Flash/SWF, such as Gnash and Lightspark, to catch up with the latest Flash innovations. The good news is that with the Gallium3D architecture on Linux there is LLVMpipe to provide an efficient CPU-based software rasterizer on Linux by leveraging the Low-Level Virtual Machine. For basic 3D needs in Flash, LLVMpipe should be fast enough on modern Intel / AMD CPUs for cases where a proper GPU driver is not available or working. There are Gallium3D state trackers for Mesa (OpenGL) and most recently and interesting is the Direct3D 10/11 state tracker. In other words, hopefully Adobe's future 3D plans and their SwiftShader adoption won't cause much of a headache for these open-source Flash Player implementations. Ideally, they shouldn't even need to worry about it if the system would automatically fall-back to LLVMpipe where installed -- once more distributions drop the classic Mesa software rasterizer that is incredibly slow and next to useless for end-users. Next week we also have some interesting benchmarks coming out of the Intel Core i7 970 looking at the LLVMpipe scaling performance when 1/2/4/6/12 threads are enabled. Full Article  
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