> - Shouldn't 2D rendering be a solved problem given that it's basically a subset of 3D rendering? The problem is that primitives artists use are different. 3

> - Shouldn't 2D rendering be a solved problem given that it's basically a subset of 3D rendering? The problem is that primitives artists use are different. 3D rendering tends to all consist of polygon meshes, which are relatively easy to render. 2D rendering (basically) consists of Bezier paths, which are harder. The equivalent in 3D, which is adaptive subdivision, is not really a solved problem in real-time either. Additionally, 2D rendering quality tends to be more important than 3D rendering quality. Whereas you can get away with 4xMSAA or hacks like FXAA in 3D, true 16xAA (without hacks) is the absolute minimum for 2D rendering quality nowadays, and even it isn't considered great for some tasks like font rendering (Pathfinder and piet-gpu both use analytic AA which is effectively 256xAA). > - Don't libraries like Skia, Qt, Cairo use GPU rendering? I've always assumed so. I mean, this is 2020, GPUs have been around for decades. There's a difference between renderers with GPU support and renderers that are oriented around using the GPU efficiently. In many cases this results in an order-of-magnitude speedup. On the GPU, state changes are expensive, and many such renderers that have GPU support don't really go out of their way to avoid them. There are also occlusion culling optimizations that most renderers don't do, but piet-gpu and Pathfinder do.