A battle-tested method for *perfectly* rendering text from its original vector representation with high performance on the GPU has existed for about 3 years now. I gather from one of your later tweets that you've seen this now: http://sluglibrary.com
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Replying to @EricLengyel @nicklockwood and
Even if we cannot check Slug for ourselves, the approach of rendering text on the GPU is guaranteed to work, as
@rikarends showed with makepad.1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @batmansmk @EricLengyel and
Interested to know what we’re the main challenges.
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Replying to @jcampbell_05 @EricLengyel and
You mean the challenges of rendering fonts on the GPU? Makepad as far as I know draw glyph per glyph from an atlas. Slug is the only one to my knowledge to do 100% on the GPU side.
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Replying to @batmansmk @jcampbell_05 and
The glyph atlas is gpu rendered. I used to use glyphy to render fonts but real gpu vectorrendering can be slow.
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Replying to @rikarends @batmansmk and
Real GPU vector rendering with high quality is very fast now that we have the Slug algorithm. It's about 25 times as fast as Glyphy, and it doesn't have Glyphy's artifacts. Times needed to completely fill 4K screens with text are on the order of tenths of a millisecond.
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Replying to @EricLengyel @rikarends and
Woot! Is it cheap in terms of power as well?
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Replying to @batmansmk @rikarends and
Haven't measured. If you keep re-rendering text, then probably not.
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Replying to @EricLengyel @batmansmk and
The piet-metal algorithms will probably be similarly fast and high quality, and will be open source, but I haven't seriously started in on font rendering yet. Also Pathfinder 3 is up there.
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Replying to @raphlinus @batmansmk and
There are situations in which many approaches break down rather badly, but they’re largely ignored until you see the failure case. For example, most algorithms don’t handle minification well and thus have aliasing problems in 3D environments. Claims of quality are often oversold.
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Both piet-metal and Pathfinder 3 do exact-area calculation, and don't depend on hardware for antialiasing. Also, piet-metal pays special attention to doing alpha blending in a linear color space. My goals include better quality than people currently expect.
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Replying to @raphlinus @batmansmk and
It's not area calculation that causes minification problems. It's the need to account for arbitrary numbers of Bézier curves per pixel. There's also the requirement for dynamic polygon dilation so ensure that pixels near curve extrema are antialiased correctly at all scales.
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Replying to @EricLengyel @batmansmk and
It sums exact-area calculation for all line segments, similar to Pathfinder 3 and font-rs (and libart before then). Right now it's flattening Bézier to lines on CPU, but I want to move that to GPU, using my new near-optimum flattening algorithm.
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