5 ms·

> "GPUs have literally no support for rendering anything other than pixels on triangles and getting them to efficiently draw Bezier curves and fills is an acti

> "GPUs have literally no support for rendering anything other than pixels on triangles and getting them to efficiently draw Bezier curves and fills is an active area of research" Well fuck me, I had no idea. I figured that 'simple 2D vectors' would be beyond piss-easy for modern GPUs. I'd never considered that it wasn't the actual math space that was accelerated, rather the fast memory mapping of everything on presumably comparatively simple geometries. You've just turned my view of the world upside down :(

ChuckMcM 4y ago
Yeah, this is something that many many people assume (vectors are "easy" on GPUs) and then are amazed (like I was!) that they aren't even in the function set. My thought was that if you were "accelerating" desktops you'd really want vectors right? But no.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  > they aren't even in the function set. they are, but on nvidia only... https://developer.nvidia.com/gpu-accelerated-path-rendering https://developer.nvidia.com/gpu-accelerated-path-rendering
  - ChuckMcM 4y ago
    The saddest web page for graphics: https://patents.justia.com/patents-by-us-classification/345/418 https://patents.justia.com/patents-by-us-classification/345/...
- int_19h 4y ago
  The interesting thing is that graphics cards in the 90s - which were "desktop accelerators" past the low end - specifically supported accelerated 2D primitives, including Bezier curves for the more powerful ones. It was all gradually dropped as cards focused on 3D games specifically.
DonHopkins 4y ago
Rendering vectors on the GPU is possible, just quite tricky. But signed distance fields work well and easily on GPUs. Here's a recent article and discussion about it: Vector graphics on GPU (gasiulis.name) 235 points by mpweiher 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 95 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32384016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32384016 https://gasiulis.name/vector-graphics-on-gpu/ https://gasiulis.name/vector-graphics-on-gpu/

ChuckMcM 4y ago

Yeah, this is something that many many people assume (vectors are "easy" on GPUs) and then are amazed (like I was!) that they aren't even in the function set. My thought was that if you were "accelerating" desktops you'd really want vectors right? But no.

jcelerier 4y ago
> they aren't even in the function set. they are, but on nvidia only... https://developer.nvidia.com/gpu-accelerated-path-rendering https://developer.nvidia.com/gpu-accelerated-path-rendering
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  The saddest web page for graphics: https://patents.justia.com/patents-by-us-classification/345/418 https://patents.justia.com/patents-by-us-classification/345/...
int_19h 4y ago
The interesting thing is that graphics cards in the 90s - which were "desktop accelerators" past the low end - specifically supported accelerated 2D primitives, including Bezier curves for the more powerful ones. It was all gradually dropped as cards focused on 3D games specifically.

DonHopkins 4y ago

Rendering vectors on the GPU is possible, just quite tricky. But signed distance fields work well and easily on GPUs. Here's a recent article and discussion about it: Vector graphics on GPU (gasiulis.name) 235 points by mpweiher 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 95 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32384016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32384016 https://gasiulis.name/vector-graphics-on-gpu/ https://gasiulis.name/vector-graphics-on-gpu/