bgfx VS Vrmac

Compare bgfx vs Vrmac and see what are their differences.

bgfx

Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library. (by bkaradzic)

Vrmac

Vrmac Graphics, a cross-platform graphics library for .NET. Supports 3D, 2D, and accelerated video playback. Works on Windows 10 and Raspberry Pi4. (by Const-me)
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bgfx Vrmac
71 45
14,167 104
- -
9.3 3.6
7 days ago over 2 years ago
C++ C#
BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

bgfx

Posts with mentions or reviews of bgfx. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-20.

Vrmac

Posts with mentions or reviews of Vrmac. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-29.
  • New Renderers for GTK
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2024
    Couple times in the past I have implemented GPU-targeted GUI renderers, here’s an example: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac?tab=readme-ov-file#vector-... https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/Vrmac/Draw/VAA...

    2D graphics have very little in common with game engines. The problem is very different in many regards. In 2D, you generally have Bezier and other splines on input, large amount of overdraw, textures coming from users complicate VRAM memory management. OTOH, game engines are solving hard problem which are irrelevant to 2D renderers, like dynamic lighting, volumetric effects, and dynamic environment.

  • Was Rust Worth It?
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2023
    I think Java is only good for long-running servers.

    Java doesn’t support C interop. For many desktop and embedded projects this is a showstopper, here’s an example https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo That C# code directly consumes V4L2 and ASIO Linux kernel APIs, and calls unmanaged user-mode DLLs like libfdk-aac.so and liba52-0.7.4.so.

    Native stack and value types in C# reduce load on GC, and the number of complicated tricks required from JIT compiler. This in turn helps with startup performance. This is critical for command-line apps, and very desirable for desktop apps.

    Another thing missing in Java is intrinsics support, both scalar like popcnt, bitscan, BMI, etc., and SIMD like SSE and AVX.

    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2023
    > Part of Panama

    Most real-live C APIs are using function pointers and/or complicated data structures. Here’s couple real-life examples defined by Linux kernel developers who made V4L2 API: [0], [1] The first of them contains a union in C version, i.e. different structures are at the same memory addresses. Note C# delivers the level of usability similar to C or C++: we simply define structures, and access these fields. Not sure this is gonna be easy in Java even after all these proposals arrive.

    For a managed runtime, unmanaged interop is a huge feature which affects all levels of the stack: type system in the language for value types, GC to be able to temporarily pin objects passed to native code (making copies is prohibitively slow for use cases like video processing), code generator to convert managed delegates to C function pointers and vice versa, error handling to automatically convert between exceptions and integer status codes at the API boundary, and more. Gonna be very hard to add into the existing language like Java.

    > "Vector API" JEP

    That API is not good. They don’t expose hardware instructions, instead they have invented some platform-agnostic API and implemented graceful degradation.

    This means the applicability is likely to be limited to pure vertical operations processing FP32 or FP64 numbers. The rest of the SIMD instructions are too different between architectures. A simple example in C++ is [2], see [3] for the context. That example is trivial to port to modern C#, but impossible to port to Java even after the proposed changes. The key part of the implementation is psadbw instruction, which is very specific to SSE2/AVX2 and these vector APIs don’t have an equivalent. Apart from reduction, other problematic operations are shuffles, saturating integer math, and some memory access patterns (gathers in AVX2, transposed loads/stores on NEON).

    > most of these are not done / not in a stable LTS Java release yet

    BTW, SIMD intrinsics arrived to C# in 2019 (.NET Core 3.0 released in 2019), and unmanaged interop support is available since the very first 1.0 version.

    [0] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...

    [1] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...

    [2] https://gist.github.com/Const-me/3ade77faad47f0fbb0538965ae7...

    [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36618344

    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2023
    Projects Panama & Valhalla seems to solve all your complaints:

    > Java doesn’t support C interop. For many desktop and embedded projects this is a showstopper, here’s an example https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo That C# code directly consumes V4L2 and ASIO Linux kernel APIs, and calls unmanaged user-mode DLLs like libfdk-aac.so and liba52-0.7.4.so.

    Part of Panama: check out the "Foreign Function & Memory API" [0]. The official docs here [1] say it is a preview in 21 but it got stabilized in Java 22 (isn't out yet).

    > Another thing missing in Java is intrinsics support, both scalar like popcnt, bitscan, BMI, etc., and SIMD like SSE and AVX.

    Also part of Panama: see the "Vector API" JEP [2].

    > Native stack and value types in C# reduce load on GC, and the number of complicated tricks required from JIT compiler. This in turn helps with startup performance. This is critical for command-line apps, and very desirable for desktop apps.

    This is part of Project Valhalla [3], they're adding value types and actual generics, among other things.

    That said, most of these are not done / not in a stable LTS Java release yet. We'll see how much better it'll be compared to C# (if at all) once all of these land.

    [0] https://openjdk.org/jeps/454

  • Stable Diffusion in pure C/C++
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Aug 2023
    I have minimal experience with Rust. OTOH, programming C++ for living since 2000, with a few gaps when I used other languages like Obj-C and C#.

    I agree C++ is very hard to learn if you only have experience with higher-level languages like Python and Scala. I think there’re two reasons for that.

    C++ is unsafe. There’s no way around this one, it was designed that way, like C or assembly. Still, with modern toolset it’s not terribly bad. Compilers print warnings, BTW I typically ask them to treat warnings as errors to deliberately fail the build. On Windows, a combination of debug build, debug C runtime, and visual studio debugger helps tremendously. Linux compilers have these sanitizers (address, memory, thread, undefined behavior) which are comparable, they too sacrifice runtime speed for diagnostics and debuggability.

    Another reason, the language itself is very complicated, especially the templates. However, just because something is in the language doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use it. You don’t need to be familiar with that stuff unless doing something very advanced, like customizing the Eigen C++ library. Don’t follow the patterns found in the standard library: unlike your code, that library has good reasons to use that template BS. If instead of templates you do something else, C++ becomes much easier to use, and most importantly other people will still be able to read and understand your code. Another reason to avoid excessive template metaprogramming, it slows down the compiler, because template-heavy code often needs to be in headers as opposed to cpp files.

    P.S. If you don’t need extreme levels of performance (defined as “approach the numbers listed in CPU specs”, the numbers are FLOPS or memory bandwidth), and you don’t need the ecosystem too much, consider C# instead of C++. Much faster than Python, often faster than Scala or Java, easy integration with C should you need that (same as Rust, much easier than Python or Java), the only downside is these ~100MB of the runtime. The reputation is weird, but technically the language and runtime are pretty good. For example, here’s a C# library which re-implements a subset of ffmpeg and libavcodec C libraries: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo

  • Media Player Element now available for cross-platform apps everywhere dotnet runs
    2 projects | /r/dotnet | 6 Jun 2023
    BTW, I did that too for 32-bit ARM Linux on Raspberry Pi 4, back in 2020: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo Unlike Uno, my implementation doesn’t use libVLC and is written mostly in C#, only audio decoders are in C++. To decode video, I directly consume V4L2 Linux kernel APIs.
  • Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell
    95 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jan 2023
    Doing that for decades.

    An app for Windows phone, downloaded 140k times: https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM

    Cross-platform graphics library for .NET: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac

    Recently, offline speech-to-text for Windows: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper

    At this point, I consider side projects like that as a hobby.

  • Minimal Cross-Platform Graphics
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2023
    I think this needs much more complexity to be useful.

    For the rendering, ideally it needs GPU support.

    Input needs much more work, here's an overview for Windows: https://zserge.com/posts/fenster/

    Windows' Sleep() function has default resolution 15.6ms, that's not enough for realtime rendering, and relatively hard to fix, ideally need a modern OS and a waitable timer created with high resolution flag.

    Here's my attempt at making something similar, couple years ago: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac

  • An MP4 file first draft
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2022
  • Cppfront, Herb Sutter's proposal for a new C++ syntax
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Sep 2022
    I agree about Python or PHP.

    However, for Java or modern C#, in my experience the performance is often fairly close. When using either of them, very often one doesn’t need C++ to be good enough.

    Here’s an example, a video player library for Raspberry Pi4: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo As written on that page, just a few things are in C++ (GLES integration, audio decoders, and couple SIMD utility functions), the majority of things are in C#.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing bgfx and Vrmac you can also consider the following projects:

GLFW - A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input

DiligentEngine - A modern cross-platform low-level graphics library and rendering framework

magnum - Lightweight and modular C++11 graphics middleware for games and data visualization

Ogre 3D - scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine (C++, Python, C#, Java)

sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers

The-Forge - The Forge Cross-Platform Rendering Framework PC Windows, Steamdeck (native), Ray Tracing, macOS / iOS, Android, XBOX, PS4, PS5, Switch, Quest 2

Skia - Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images.

raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

wgpu - Cross-platform, safe, pure-rust graphics api.

urho3d - Game engine

OpenSceneGraph - OpenSceneGraph git repository

vulkan-guide - Introductory guide to vulkan.