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> You have to be spectacularly bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a very high-end gaming computer. I don't understand why desktop

> You have to be spectacularly bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a very high-end gaming computer. I don't understand why desktop app user interfaces aren't blazingly fast and 240fps. That being said, I think current iOS and macOS can run their UIs at 120fps (and Apple devices still seem to have decent battery life.)

duped 4y ago
GPU accelerated vector graphics rendering is an open problem.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  is it? MacOS has rendered the entire UI via PDF since OSX was first released.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphics. The one example I can think of is the Slug library.
    - djbusby 4y ago
      Like? SVG UIs everywhere? Could you make a UI that's like SVG and onclick handlers do the "magic". We could have a VB6 like SVG UI designer and program "actions" in $LANG?
      - ygra 4y ago
        WPF would probably be that. In any case, modern UI toolkits often are vector-based anyway because of UI scaling. Heck, even ancient ones are, if you look at the Marlett font. That contained scalable UI elements for Windows 95.
    - ehvatum 4y ago
      > afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphic Sure there has been, in the form of the nvidia path rendering extension. https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering It works great, on nvidia cards. Adobe Illustrator on Windows makes good use of it. Calling the extension from C/C++ and Python is no big deal.
  - astrange 4y ago
    It's not really PDF, it just supports similar operations to PDF. There's more SVG UI elements now.
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      but it’s vector graphics, right?
      - astrange 4y ago
        Only very recently. Like, all that old Aqua stuff wasn't vectors, it was done in Photoshop. Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px.
        naikrovek 4y ago
        > Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. yes, but that alone doesn't require that bitmap graphics be used. > With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px. only if your renderer or your artwork isn't done correctly; inkscape used to be notorious for floating point rounding errors showing up with very few manipulations of a shape. it's also been very easy to very quickly rasterize vector graphics for some time. maybe not fast enough in the past I guess, but computers are certainly fast enough now. I look forward to a time when UIs are just all vector all the time, and it's the monitor itself which rasterizes, thanks to a program that the attached device uploads as it boots up or as the monitor is connected. it's going to get more and more difficult to continue increasing display resolutions and refresh rates over long inexpensive cables if we continue to rasterize on a computer and push raw pixels to the display device.
- raphlinus 4y ago
  For now. Unfortunately, even if you have very fast drawing, there are plenty of other ways to make software slow. But high performance GUI software is the main thing I'm working on at the moment and I expect to have interesting results in the coming months. If nothing else, it should be a data point of how fast GUI software can be.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    I’m super excited to hear about this. I’ve been working on a programming language for UI designers, and I ran into some massive issues when I tried to build my own renderer. Gave up and now I’m just transpiling to other languages instead.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    Eagerly awaiting this!
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  It isn’t an open problem for text editors or terminals, which is the point Casey made in his videos.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    text editors and terminals don’t render vector graphics though, do they? they rely on libraries to rasterize glyphs of a font into a bitmap once and use the bitmaps over and over.
    - _gabe_ 4y ago
      > they rely on libraries to rasterize glyphs of a font into a bitmap once Unfortunately it's not this simple. Unicode and multilingual support means you can't possibly generate a single bitmap to contain all possible characters. Modern UIs (including text editors and terminals) generally support various zoom levels, which requires re-rasterizing glyphs at different zoom levels. This means you typically have to rasterize vector graphics (your font) on the fly as needed and then update your bitmap. Edit: Also, emojis and certain scripts require composting multiple glyphs together. This means you have to figure out which glyphs are required for your codepoint and use your font metrics to composite the glyphs appropriately. Then throw in mathematical notation and all bets are off. My point is, rendering text is not a simple done deal, but it's also not an impossible feat and it can be done efficiently.
      - naikrovek 4y ago
        that is a very pedantic argument. you completely overlooked the point i was trying to make. vector graphics are not rendered directly to the screen. fonts are rasterized first, then the rasterization is what the GPU receives.
        _gabe_ 4y ago
        > vector graphics are not rendered directly to the screen. What difference does it make if you're caching the rasterization or not? You're still rendering vector graphics. And you're not just rasterizing once. Modern font renderers can't get away with rasterizing glyphs once and reusing them anymore than arbitrary vector graphics renderers can. I sure hope my vector graphics editors cache the rasterizations instead of re-rasterizing needlessly.
- rayiner 4y ago
  But you don’t have to do it every frame. Most apps could just render to bitmaps once and cache the results.
- userbinator 4y ago
  You shouldn't even need a GPU for basic UI like this, especially with "modern" ultra-minimalist flat UIs.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    Yeah, but they're not actually completely flat since they're translucent. Also, on Windows, the "acrylic" thing is a circus show. Every app behaves differently. It also manages to sometimes lag on an RX5600. I know it's an "old" gpu, but still...
- jcelerier 4y ago
  Maybe basic productivity applications shouldn't try to tackle open research problems and instead just do the thing which has worked fine for the last 30 years which is CPU rendering? Like, do you think notepad is going to burn your battery because it redraws 20x20 pixels on every mouse event ?
- moonchild 4y ago
  It is being worked on (ahem...) But in most contexts, it is not necessary to render vector graphics 'live'; caching is acceptable, so this should not be a bottleneck for most desktop software.
strulovich 4y ago
A lot of the speed games get is by having bad load times when starting up. Keeping startup really fast and all interactions really fast is more challenging than it seems. This is not the whole story, but one example of the differences in perception.
- wtetzner 4y ago
  But games are loading enormous textures, meshes, maps, etc. UIs don’t need any of that.
  - astrange 4y ago
    A mesh may have a lot of triangles, but it's still a single object you can memory map. UIs are typically a bunch of heap allocations and pointer jumping all created at runtime. That can be surprisingly inefficient.
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
      then make it efficient. overallocate a block of memory and use it for all your tiny ui elements. its exactly what games do.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Arena allocators only work when everything has the same lifetime. There are game-like UI libraries (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) but to use them you have to write your program like you're a gamedev and Conway's Law usually fights that.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Streaming in hundreds of assets as you walk around an open world does surely take a different pipeline, but as a show of computing competence it is staggering. You should see how fast some of these truly massive games load nowadays. The fact that the notepad app takes forever to load when all it needs to load is the UI is just a sad state of affairs.
WalterBright 4y ago
> I don't understand why desktop app user interfaces aren't blazingly fast and 240fps. Telemetry back to HQ takes resources. I began to notice my disk drive light flickering regularly even when I was doing nothing with the computer, and the computer started seeming sluggish. I'd look at the process list, and started randomly forcing them to quit. Suddenly, the drive light stopped flashing. I'd found my man. Googling the name of the process, it belonged to a program I'd bought that served media files to my Roku box. But I wasn't asking it to stream anything at the time. I didn't know what the hell it was doing, but couldn't justify it, and removed the program.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Googling the name of the process, it belonged to a program I'd bought that served media files to my Roku box. But I wasn't asking it to stream anything at the time. Maybe it was indexing.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    It doesn't take days to index my hard disk. Besides, I configured it with the path the media files. There's no reason to spy on the rest of the drive.
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    Why would it be indexing if no files are changed?
thefz 4y ago
> That being said, I think current iOS and macOS can run their UIs at 120fps (and Apple devices still seem to have decent battery life.) The same critique for Apple applies all the time, when you are completely vertically integrated and make your own chips up to the very software running on them, it's kinda easier. That aside, there's no display offering above 60Hz IIRC in the Apple line. Correct me if I am wrong.
- Kipters 4y ago
  14" and 16" MacBook Pros are equipped with 120 Hz displays
- shadowfacts 4y ago
  The phone and laptop have had them since last year, the iPad Pro has had them for years and years now.

duped 4y ago

GPU accelerated vector graphics rendering is an open problem.

naikrovek 4y ago
is it? MacOS has rendered the entire UI via PDF since OSX was first released.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphics. The one example I can think of is the Slug library.
  - djbusby 4y ago
    Like? SVG UIs everywhere? Could you make a UI that's like SVG and onclick handlers do the "magic". We could have a VB6 like SVG UI designer and program "actions" in $LANG?
    - ygra 4y ago
      WPF would probably be that. In any case, modern UI toolkits often are vector-based anyway because of UI scaling. Heck, even ancient ones are, if you look at the Marlett font. That contained scalable UI elements for Windows 95.
  - ehvatum 4y ago
    > afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphic Sure there has been, in the form of the nvidia path rendering extension. https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering It works great, on nvidia cards. Adobe Illustrator on Windows makes good use of it. Calling the extension from C/C++ and Python is no big deal.
- astrange 4y ago
  It's not really PDF, it just supports similar operations to PDF. There's more SVG UI elements now.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    but it’s vector graphics, right?
    - astrange 4y ago
      Only very recently. Like, all that old Aqua stuff wasn't vectors, it was done in Photoshop. Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px.
      - naikrovek 4y ago
        > Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. yes, but that alone doesn't require that bitmap graphics be used. > With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px. only if your renderer or your artwork isn't done correctly; inkscape used to be notorious for floating point rounding errors showing up with very few manipulations of a shape. it's also been very easy to very quickly rasterize vector graphics for some time. maybe not fast enough in the past I guess, but computers are certainly fast enough now. I look forward to a time when UIs are just all vector all the time, and it's the monitor itself which rasterizes, thanks to a program that the attached device uploads as it boots up or as the monitor is connected. it's going to get more and more difficult to continue increasing display resolutions and refresh rates over long inexpensive cables if we continue to rasterize on a computer and push raw pixels to the display device.
raphlinus 4y ago
For now. Unfortunately, even if you have very fast drawing, there are plenty of other ways to make software slow. But high performance GUI software is the main thing I'm working on at the moment and I expect to have interesting results in the coming months. If nothing else, it should be a data point of how fast GUI software can be.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I’m super excited to hear about this. I’ve been working on a programming language for UI designers, and I ran into some massive issues when I tried to build my own renderer. Gave up and now I’m just transpiling to other languages instead.
- jahewson 4y ago
  Eagerly awaiting this!
jiggawatts 4y ago
It isn’t an open problem for text editors or terminals, which is the point Casey made in his videos.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  text editors and terminals don’t render vector graphics though, do they? they rely on libraries to rasterize glyphs of a font into a bitmap once and use the bitmaps over and over.
  - _gabe_ 4y ago
    > they rely on libraries to rasterize glyphs of a font into a bitmap once Unfortunately it's not this simple. Unicode and multilingual support means you can't possibly generate a single bitmap to contain all possible characters. Modern UIs (including text editors and terminals) generally support various zoom levels, which requires re-rasterizing glyphs at different zoom levels. This means you typically have to rasterize vector graphics (your font) on the fly as needed and then update your bitmap. Edit: Also, emojis and certain scripts require composting multiple glyphs together. This means you have to figure out which glyphs are required for your codepoint and use your font metrics to composite the glyphs appropriately. Then throw in mathematical notation and all bets are off. My point is, rendering text is not a simple done deal, but it's also not an impossible feat and it can be done efficiently.
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      that is a very pedantic argument. you completely overlooked the point i was trying to make. vector graphics are not rendered directly to the screen. fonts are rasterized first, then the rasterization is what the GPU receives.
      - _gabe_ 4y ago
        > vector graphics are not rendered directly to the screen. What difference does it make if you're caching the rasterization or not? You're still rendering vector graphics. And you're not just rasterizing once. Modern font renderers can't get away with rasterizing glyphs once and reusing them anymore than arbitrary vector graphics renderers can. I sure hope my vector graphics editors cache the rasterizations instead of re-rasterizing needlessly.
rayiner 4y ago
But you don’t have to do it every frame. Most apps could just render to bitmaps once and cache the results.
userbinator 4y ago
You shouldn't even need a GPU for basic UI like this, especially with "modern" ultra-minimalist flat UIs.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  Yeah, but they're not actually completely flat since they're translucent. Also, on Windows, the "acrylic" thing is a circus show. Every app behaves differently. It also manages to sometimes lag on an RX5600. I know it's an "old" gpu, but still...
jcelerier 4y ago
Maybe basic productivity applications shouldn't try to tackle open research problems and instead just do the thing which has worked fine for the last 30 years which is CPU rendering? Like, do you think notepad is going to burn your battery because it redraws 20x20 pixels on every mouse event ?
moonchild 4y ago
It is being worked on (ahem...) But in most contexts, it is not necessary to render vector graphics 'live'; caching is acceptable, so this should not be a bottleneck for most desktop software.

strulovich 4y ago

A lot of the speed games get is by having bad load times when starting up. Keeping startup really fast and all interactions really fast is more challenging than it seems. This is not the whole story, but one example of the differences in perception.

wtetzner 4y ago
But games are loading enormous textures, meshes, maps, etc. UIs don’t need any of that.
- astrange 4y ago
  A mesh may have a lot of triangles, but it's still a single object you can memory map. UIs are typically a bunch of heap allocations and pointer jumping all created at runtime. That can be surprisingly inefficient.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    then make it efficient. overallocate a block of memory and use it for all your tiny ui elements. its exactly what games do.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Arena allocators only work when everything has the same lifetime. There are game-like UI libraries (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) but to use them you have to write your program like you're a gamedev and Conway's Law usually fights that.
ehnto 4y ago
Streaming in hundreds of assets as you walk around an open world does surely take a different pipeline, but as a show of computing competence it is staggering. You should see how fast some of these truly massive games load nowadays. The fact that the notepad app takes forever to load when all it needs to load is the UI is just a sad state of affairs.

WalterBright 4y ago

> I don't understand why desktop app user interfaces aren't blazingly fast and 240fps. Telemetry back to HQ takes resources. I began to notice my disk drive light flickering regularly even when I was doing nothing with the computer, and the computer started seeming sluggish. I'd look at the process list, and started randomly forcing them to quit. Suddenly, the drive light stopped flashing. I'd found my man. Googling the name of the process, it belonged to a program I'd bought that served media files to my Roku box. But I wasn't asking it to stream anything at the time. I didn't know what the hell it was doing, but couldn't justify it, and removed the program.

lelanthran 4y ago
> Googling the name of the process, it belonged to a program I'd bought that served media files to my Roku box. But I wasn't asking it to stream anything at the time. Maybe it was indexing.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  It doesn't take days to index my hard disk. Besides, I configured it with the path the media files. There's no reason to spy on the rest of the drive.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Why would it be indexing if no files are changed?

thefz 4y ago

> That being said, I think current iOS and macOS can run their UIs at 120fps (and Apple devices still seem to have decent battery life.) The same critique for Apple applies all the time, when you are completely vertically integrated and make your own chips up to the very software running on them, it's kinda easier. That aside, there's no display offering above 60Hz IIRC in the Apple line. Correct me if I am wrong.

Kipters 4y ago
14" and 16" MacBook Pros are equipped with 120 Hz displays
shadowfacts 4y ago
The phone and laptop have had them since last year, the iPad Pro has had them for years and years now.