How to get the most out of llvmpipe?

Hi all,

I investigated the performance of Mesa's llvmpipe with our application. Unfortunately, I don't seem to get the most out of llvmpipe, as my 8 cores never exceed 1% fractional CPU load by the llvmpipe threads while my framerates are rather poor. Using a hardware accelerated driver, I get reasonable high framerates. Thus, there should be no problem with my application logic throttling everything down...

As openarena is often used for benchmarking, I did another test with llvmpipe and openarena. And wow, all my cores are loaded with 6 to 8% by llvmpipe threads making up a beautiful 50 to 60fps.

Now my question is: What am I doing wrong?
Is there something I have to take care of to get a good rendering performance with llvmpipe?
Are there some special guidelines I have to follow?
Some Dos and Don'ts?

Kind regards,
Thomas