3 ms·

I am a bit confused. I do not think that hardware accelerated UI was a thing until quite recently and people did not really have issues with its performance. If

I am a bit confused. I do not think that hardware accelerated UI was a thing until quite recently and people did not really have issues with its performance. If anything it feels like that accelerated UI drawing is slower on older machines compared to software-rendered UI.

kaba0 5y ago
Well, try using any graphical application from inside a vm (those are often software accelerated only). But the problem is basically: you can either have 1-2-4-8 cores at most writing pixels into a buffer one after another (but due to the complexity of interactive GUIs it will most often be single threaded), so a circle will be displayed as going over an area and coloring each pixel. Versus specifying some condition and having the GPU run it on every pixel in large batches, almost doing it in one go. Of course for 3 lines, what previous GUI iterations were, you don’t need gpu, but for gradients, media!, and basically a bunch of other things you simply need the GPU’s orders of magnitude more parallelism. Add to the picture that we are using much bigger screen resolutions (full hd has 6x number of pixels compared to 480p, and then we are not even talking about 4k. And 120, 240fps monitors are a thing now) and you can quickly see that 1) drawing is a greatly parallelizable task 2) having it done serialized simply doesn’t scale to today screens.
- ttybird2 5y ago
  "try using any graphical application from inside a vm" This is because said graphical applications are designed to be used with a modern GPU and they use stuff like OpenGL to render their components. "but for gradients" Maybe we can go without them. Modern UIs are too heavy, latency-inducing, battery consuming, and can turn your device into a heater easily. "And 120, 240fps monitors are a thing now" Re-drawing the window in every frame is a wasteful action that tends not to happen with applications designed for software rendering.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    The drawing lib used by chrome is ridiculously performant - the problem is not at lower layers in case of modern UIs. Specific hardware will also be much more efficient than general purpose one, so no, gpus are not the culprit behind any of those. While you may not like gradients, animations (which absolutely mandate GPUs) for example do give context on what happens because humans are used to physical objects that don’t teleport from one place to another. I wouldn’t consider these needless features either.

kaba0 5y ago

Well, try using any graphical application from inside a vm (those are often software accelerated only). But the problem is basically: you can either have 1-2-4-8 cores at most writing pixels into a buffer one after another (but due to the complexity of interactive GUIs it will most often be single threaded), so a circle will be displayed as going over an area and coloring each pixel. Versus specifying some condition and having the GPU run it on every pixel in large batches, almost doing it in one go. Of course for 3 lines, what previous GUI iterations were, you don’t need gpu, but for gradients, media!, and basically a bunch of other things you simply need the GPU’s orders of magnitude more parallelism. Add to the picture that we are using much bigger screen resolutions (full hd has 6x number of pixels compared to 480p, and then we are not even talking about 4k. And 120, 240fps monitors are a thing now) and you can quickly see that 1) drawing is a greatly parallelizable task 2) having it done serialized simply doesn’t scale to today screens.

ttybird2 5y ago
"try using any graphical application from inside a vm" This is because said graphical applications are designed to be used with a modern GPU and they use stuff like OpenGL to render their components. "but for gradients" Maybe we can go without them. Modern UIs are too heavy, latency-inducing, battery consuming, and can turn your device into a heater easily. "And 120, 240fps monitors are a thing now" Re-drawing the window in every frame is a wasteful action that tends not to happen with applications designed for software rendering.
- kaba0 5y ago
  The drawing lib used by chrome is ridiculously performant - the problem is not at lower layers in case of modern UIs. Specific hardware will also be much more efficient than general purpose one, so no, gpus are not the culprit behind any of those. While you may not like gradients, animations (which absolutely mandate GPUs) for example do give context on what happens because humans are used to physical objects that don’t teleport from one place to another. I wouldn’t consider these needless features either.