Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 25 minutes ago
Mesa's CPU based Vulkan renderer "Lavapipe" that is being used with a Proton fork called Proton-Sarek. This allows for the use of a fully software implemented CPU based Vulkan rendering pipeline. Performance is much slower than a GPU, obviously, but the game is being run completely independently from the GPU (in this case a GTX 1080 Ti) and allows for "emulating" features like ray tracing even, with CPU rendering. So, it's even slower than GPU's that don't support RT trying to run it. So it's not practical for playing games. But it's a very interesting concept/experiment that I just learned about today and got working and quickly had to share it. I just installed Fedora yesterday so I've been doing some experimenting and it's interesting so far...
Fedora 41
Core i9 11900k
32GB RAM
GTX 1080 Ti
PROTON_VK_SOFTWARE=1 %command% PROTON_SAREK_PROFILE agg %command%
phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-Vulkan-Descriptors
phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-Vulkan-1.3-Official
phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Lavapipe-Vulkan-1.4
phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-RT-Pipelines-Mesa-24.1
Proton-Sarek GitHub
github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek?tab=readme-ov-file#Sarek
This is a fork of Valve's Proton that impliments an optional feature for enabling Mesa's Lavapipe Vulkan renderer, which is a fully CPU based software rendering pipeline. In this example, Proton is converting Risk of Rain 2 to Vulkan and running that on the CPU using Lavapipe, at very low FPS.
I did not realize software rendering was still possible in games today! And I mean it isn't by default. It was back in the day and you could toggle between software rendering and OpenGL in games like Half-Life 1 or Quake. But now apprently on Linux you can force any game to use software rendering and run it without a GPU! in 2025! Pretty cool. I'm gonna have to do more tests.
0:00 - 3:18 Setup and setttings
3:18 - 6:27 640x480 Low Settings CPU Rendering with Lavapipe
6:27 - 7:29 1280x720 Low Settings CPU Rendering with Lavapipe
7:29 - 8:34 320x200 Low Settings 20fps!! with CPU rendering! and then crash...
Mesa's CPU based Vulkan renderer "Lavapipe" that is being used with a Proton fork called Proton-Sarek. This allows for the use of a fully software implemented CPU based Vulkan rendering pipeline. Performance is much slower than a GPU, obviously, but the game is being run completely independently from the GPU (in this case a GTX 1080 Ti) and allows for "emulating" features like ray tracing even, with CPU rendering. So, it's even slower than GPU's that don't support RT trying to run it. So it's not practical for playing games. But it's a very interesting concept/experiment that I just learned about today and got working and quickly had to share it. I just installed Fedora yesterday so I've been doing some experimenting and it's interesting so far...
Fedora 41
Core i9 11900k
32GB RAM
GTX 1080 Ti
PROTON_VK_SOFTWARE=1 %command% PROTON_SAREK_PROFILE agg %command%
phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-Vulkan-Descriptors
phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-Vulkan-1.3-Official
phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Lavapipe-Vulkan-1.4
phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-RT-Pipelines-Mesa-24.1
Proton-Sarek GitHub
github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek?tab=readme-ov-file#Sarek
This is a fork of Valve's Proton that impliments an optional feature for enabling Mesa's Lavapipe Vulkan renderer, which is a fully CPU based software rendering pipeline. In this example, Proton is converting Risk of Rain 2 to Vulkan and running that on the CPU using Lavapipe, at very low FPS.
I did not realize software rendering was still possible in games today! And I mean it isn't by default. It was back in the day and you could toggle between software rendering and OpenGL in games like Half-Life 1 or Quake. But now apprently on Linux you can force any game to use software rendering and run it without a GPU! in 2025! Pretty cool. I'm gonna have to do more tests.
0:00 - 3:18 Setup and setttings
3:18 - 6:27 640x480 Low Settings CPU Rendering with Lavapipe
6:27 - 7:29 1280x720 Low Settings CPU Rendering with Lavapipe
7:29 - 8:34 320x200 Low Settings 20fps!! with CPU rendering! and then crash...
![Doom Eternal (Nekravol) [GTX 1060 6GB][i5 4690k@4.4ghz][Windows]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eah_22ci9VU/mqdefault.jpg "Doom Eternal (Nekravol) [GTX 1060 6GB][i5 4690k@4.4ghz][Windows]
Minor spoilers for the Nekravol level. I cant quite get a locked 60 with my setup, even with the settings lowered. So I play this game with a 50fps cap on a mix of low/higher settings. This game looks great regardless so low still looks quite good. With all that, it runs great! There is an added stutter from my recording software, which is not present in gameplay.")
