vello
nanovg
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vello | nanovg | |
---|---|---|
31 | 2 | |
1,921 | 27 | |
7.4% | - | |
9.4 | 0.0 | |
4 days ago | almost 5 years ago | |
Rust | C | |
Apache License 2.0 | zlib License |
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.
vello
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Rive Renderer – now open source and available on all platforms
I'm looking forward to doing careful benchmarking, as this renderer absolutely looks like it will be competitive. It turns out that is really hard to do, if you want meaningful results.
My initial take is that performance will be pretty dependent on hardware, in particular support for pixel local storage[1]. From what I've seen so far, Apple Silicon is the sweet spot, as there is hardware support for binning and sorting to tiles, and then asking for fragment shader execution to be serialized within a tile works well. On other hardware, I expect the cost of serializing those invocations to be much higher.
One reason we haven't done deep benchmarking on the Vello side is that our performance story is far from done. We know one current issue is the use of device atomics for aggregating bounding boxes. We have a prototype implementation [2] that uses monoids for segmented reduction. Additionally, we plan to do f16 math (which should be a major win especially on mobile), as well as using subgroups for various prefix sum steps (subgroups are in the process of landing in WebGPU[3]).
Overall, I'm thrilled to see this released as open source, and that there's so much activity in fast GPU vector graphics rendering. I'd love to see a future in which CPU path rendering is seen as being behind the times, and this moves us closer to that future.
[1]: https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn/+/refs/heads/main/docs/da...
- WebKit Switching to Skia for 2D Graphics Rendering
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Looking for this. html + css rendering through wgpu.
Dioxus is working on this with blitz. It's leveraging wgpu through the linebender group's Vello renderer. Still in early stages.
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A note on Metal shader converter
If you're doing advanced compute work (including lock-free data structures), then it's best effort.
https://github.com/linebender/vello/issues/42 is an issue from when Vello (then piet-gpu) had a single-pass prefix sum algorithm. Looking back, I'm fairly confident that it's a shader translation issue and that it wouldn't work with MoltenVK either, but we stopped investigating when we moved to a more robustly portable approach.
- Vello: An experimental WebGPU-based compute-centric 2D renderer in Rust
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XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox
There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:
- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)
- https://github.com/vizia/vizia
- https://github.com/marc2332/freya
- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)
What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:
- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)
- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)
- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)
- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)
- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)
- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)
In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)
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Drawing and Annotation in Rust
blessed.rs lists these three crates for 2D drawing: - https://lib.rs/crates/femtovg - https://lib.rs/crates/skia-safe - https://github.com/linebender/vello
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Recommended UI framework to draw many 2D lines?
Vello (https://github.com/linebender/vello) which uses wgpu to render Edit: just saw you require images. Vello doesn't support those yet
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Announcing piet-glow, a GL-based implementation of Piet for 2D rendering
How does this relate to Vello? Both target raw-window-handle for winit compatibility. Vello uses WGPU vs piet-glow using GL.
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Is WGPU actually a good idea yet?
Finally, maybe vello could help you with ideas. It's not production ready yet, but they have some interesting ideas for 2D rendering using wgpu.
nanovg
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So you want to write a GUI framework
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
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2D Graphics on Modern GPU (2019)
> 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?
msdfgen - Multi-channel signed distance field generator
bgfx - Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.
Vrmac - Vrmac Graphics, a cross-platform graphics library for .NET. Supports 3D, 2D, and accelerated video playback. Works on Windows 10 and Raspberry Pi4.
libGDX - Desktop/Android/HTML5/iOS Java game development framework
troika - A JavaScript framework for interactive 3D and 2D visualizations
tinyraytracer - A brief computer graphics / rendering course
ds_cinder - An application framework built on Cinder
gpuweb - Where the GPU for the Web work happens!
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
compute-shader-101 - Sample code for compute shader 101 training
VCSamples - Samples for VC++