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delhanty 7 days ago

Congratulations!

Can you say how the it's similar and how it's different to superficially similar sounding work?

(1) https://github.com/linebender/vello , dual Apache/MIT, by Raph Levien et al

(2) https://sluglibrary.com/ , proprietary, by Eric Lengyel (Terathon)

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mindbrix 5 days ago | parent [-]

Slug is primarily designed for text rendering.

Vello is general purpose, like Rasterizer, but is based on GPU compute. Rasterizer uses the 'traditional' GPU pipeline. Performance numbers for both look very competitive, although Vello seems to have issues with GPU lock up at certain zoom scales. Rasterizer has been heavily tested with huge scenes at any scale.

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delhanty 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you very much for that concise explanation.

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cubefox 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Stupid question: Why not use the hardware (fixed function) rasterizer inside the GPU? I guess that one is only optimized for triangles.

	▲	mindbrix 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The longer answer is that using straight-edged geometry to represent curves is a resolution-dependent operation, e.g. a full screen circle may need to be flattened to an 80-sided polygon. Rasterizer can solve quadratic curves in the fragment shaders, which massively reduces the geometry needed for a scene. Also, the native rasterizer only supports MSAA, which is inferior to reference analytic area AA.
	▲	mindbrix 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Good question and answer ;-)