libGDX VS nanovg

Compare libGDX vs nanovg and see what are their differences.

nanovg

Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations. (by Const-me)
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libGDX nanovg
61 2
22,689 27
0.6% -
8.8 0.0
1 day ago almost 5 years ago
Java C
Apache License 2.0 zlib 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.

libGDX

Posts with mentions or reviews of libGDX. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-24.

nanovg

Posts with mentions or reviews of nanovg. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-08-11.
  • So you want to write a GUI framework
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Aug 2021
    BGFX is a general-purpose 3D graphics engine, not a GUI nor vector graphics framework.

    Nanovg is an awesome vector graphics library, but has limitations. (1) no ClearType, I fixed in my fork: https://github.com/Const-me/nanovg (2) The only way to get AA is hardware MSAA, unfortunately many popular platforms like Raspberry Pi don’t have good enough hardware to do it fast enough. Nanogui is built on top of Nanovg, shares the limitations.

    I agree with the OP that Cairo and Skia are the only viable ones for Linux.

    It’s sad because Windows has Direct2D for decades now (introduced in Vista), and unlike 2006, now in 2021 Linux actually has all the lower-level pieces to implement a comparable equivalent. Here’s a proof of concept: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac#vector-graphics-engine

  • 2D Graphics on Modern GPU (2019)
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2021
    > in your words, that "the quality is not good"

    Oh, you were asking why I said so? Because I have clicked the “notes document” link in the article, the OP used the same tiger test image as me, and that document has a couple of screenshots. And these were the only screenshots I have found. Compare them to screenshots of the same vector image rendered by my library, and you’ll see why I noted about the quality.

    > Vrmacs draws paths by decomposing them into triangles, rendering them with the GPU rasterizer, and antialiasing edges using screen-space derivatives in the fragment shader.

    More or less, but (a) not always, thin lines are different. (b) that’s a high-level overview but there’re many important details on the lower levels. For instance, “screen-space derivatives of what?” is an interesting question, critically important for correct and uniform stroke widths. The meshes I’m building are rotation-agnostic, and to some extent (but not completely) they are resolution-agnostic too.

    > and it is perfectly capable of rendering high-quality small text on the GPU

    It is, but the performance overhead is massive, compared to GPU rasterizer rendering these triangles. For real-world vector graphics that doesn’t have too much stuff per pixel that complexity is not needed because triangle meshes are good enough already.

    > it looks like it occupies a sweet spot similar to NanoVG

    They’re similarities, I have copy-pasted a few text-related things from my fork of NanoVG: https://github.com/Const-me/nanovg/ However, Vrmac delivers much higher quality of 2D vector graphics (VAA, circular arcs, thin strokes, etc), is much faster (meshes are typically reused across frames), and is more compatible (GL support on Windows or OSX is not good, you want D3D or Metal respectively).

What are some alternatives?

When comparing libGDX and nanovg you can also consider the following projects:

jMonkeyEngine - A complete 3-D game development suite written in Java.

vello - An experimental GPU compute-centric 2D renderer.

LWJGL - LWJGL is a Java library that enables cross-platform access to popular native APIs useful in the development of graphics (OpenGL, Vulkan, bgfx), audio (OpenAL, Opus), parallel computing (OpenCL, CUDA) and XR (OpenVR, LibOVR, OpenXR) applications.

bgfx - Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.

FXGL - Java / JavaFX / Kotlin Game Library (Engine)

msdfgen - Multi-channel signed distance field generator

Cocos2d - Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x.

ds_cinder - An application framework built on Cinder

Litiengine - LITIENGINE 🕹 The pure 2D java game engine.

nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.

LiquidFun - 2D physics engine for games

VCSamples - Samples for VC++