Blend2D – 2D Vector Graphics Engine (opens in new tab)

There are a few of those out there. Nanovg seems to be the one that fits your requirements most closely. If you're into Rust, lyon (plus something like gfx-rs) is another choice.

It's also worth noting that the HTML canvas implementations in most browsers is also not too bad for performance. Quartz is also really fast, but Apple made it really easy to accidentally use a slow rendering path (especially for bitmap operations)

I have had great success using the ideas presented here (http://m1el.github.io/woscope-how/index.html) for simulation of traditional vector graphic screens. It is very fast and easily modified to allow for intensity modulation as well.

Pathfinder fits the description: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder

This AR demo on MagicLeap shows the potential: https://twitter.com/asajeffrey/status/1106667615622180864

GPUs really just aren't designed for 2D vector graphics. There is a litany of approaches (three separate ones from pcwalton's Pathfinder R&D alone), and all of them have various issues and tradeoffs. If your GPU has enough power for one of the more advanced approaches like Slug or Pathfinder1's compute shaders, then your CPU likely has enough for Blend2D and the bandwidth for the resulting texture upload.

Pathfinder3 looks promising, but comes with its own tradeoffs. It's an open area of research.

It's true that increasing the size of framebuffer demands more from CPU as well. According to my experience a single core on a modern machine has no problem to render real-time into a FullHD framebuffer at high frame rate (depending on the content of course, but UI is fine). This means that multithreaded renderers using 4 threads should be able to render to 4K framebuffer without any issues. Since AMD will release 16c/32t consumer CPUs this year I see no problem on this front as we will have the computational power to run several multithreaded renderers at the same time.

Blend2D has multithreaded rendering on roadmap - I have experience in this topic and everything in Blend2D was designed with multithreading in mind (banding for example). The implementation I'm planning would scale very well.

NV_path_rendering - I haven't seen any detailed comparison to be honest. Frame-rate is not enough to compare CPU vs GPU technology - both memory consumption and power consumption are important as well to calculate frame-rate per watt.

I cannot comment on Direct2D as it's not open source and it runs only on a single operating system. So I don't consider Direct2D as a competition at the moment.

> are either unmaintained (like Antigrain)

The author of Antigrain passed away a few years back, sadly.

It was and still probably is one of the best graphics libraries out there, and he was really hoping for a time when antialias-free, vector-based UI on high-pixel-density screens would become reality.

[1] Announcement in Russian: https://rsdn.org/forum/life/5377743.flat

"Maxim Shemanarev 1966-2013. Tragically, unexpectedly passed away in his home at 47." The discussion that follows names epileptic seizure as the cause of death.

[2] For example, this glorious text on text rasterization from 2007 http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...

Skia is actually not too hard to build once you're used to gn and ninja. Download both of those tools and add them to your PATH, then cd into Skia's repo (that you just cloned):

    $ python tools/git-sync-deps
    $ gn gen out/release -args="is_official_build=true is_component_build=false"
    $ ninja -C out/release

This will build it as a static library. I believe by default it will try to use system libraries, you can make it use its own version of those libraries in this slightly more complicated process (which could be done with a script but I'm too lazy to write one right now):

    $ gn args out/release --list --short

This will print all the current build arguments, copy all the use_system_XXX = true, you'll have to modify those to be = false, and paste them into the text editor that will open once you run:

    $ gn args out/release

After that, run ninja to build

    $ ninja -C out/release

For the include files, you have to add at least these to your include directory:

    include
    include/config
    include/core
    include/effects
    include/gpu

On Windows, you might want to have two builds linking against different versions of the std lib (because of the whole iterator debug level stuff). Add these args: extra_cflags=["/MTd"] and extra_cflags=["/MT"] for debug/release builds (statically linked in this case).

Skia is not so terrible, you just have to use their slightly obscure build tool. And it produces >8GB build artefacts with ~50 or more dependencies... Come to think of it is a bit of a nightmare.

This is what we really need, something that outputs an API agnostic set of render commands, (shaders, uniforms, mesh layouts etc) which auto clip themselves and such, so they can just be integrated across various engines and renderers.

Of course a better format in the first place(mentioned in another comment) would just solve this anyway

Really appreciated, thank you!

Blend2D uses dense cell-buffer similarly to font-rs, however, it works quite differently and this difference allows Blend2D to be efficient even when rendering large paths:

- Dense cell buffer, 32-bit integer per one cell (FreeType/Qt use sparse cell buffer and two 32-bit integers per cell, font-rs uses float if I'm not mistaken)

- Blend2D builds edges before rasterization step, edge builder is optimized and performs clipping and curve flattening

- Rasterization and composition happens in bands, thus storage required by the cell buffer is quite small (currently band is 32 scanlines, but we will make it adjustable based on width)

- To complement dense cell buffer Blend2D uses also a shadow bit-buffer to mark cells that were altered by the rasterizer

- Compositor scans bit-buffer instead of cell-buffer to quickly skip areas that were not touched by the rasterizer

- Compositor is SIMD optimized and calculates multiple masks at the same time (at the moment it works at 4 pixels at a time, but this can be extended easily to 8 and 16 pixels)

- Compositor clears both cell-buffer and shadow bit-buffer during composition so when the compositor finishes these buffers are zeroed and ready for another band

- Blend2D maintains small zeroed memory pool that is used to quickly allocate cell and bit buffers when you create the rendering context and returned to the pool when you destroy it

There are probably more differences, like parametrization of NonZero and EvenOdd fill rules, etc, but these are really implementation details to minimize the number of pipelines generated by common rendering operations.

The advantage of font-rs is rendering small paths, large paths will have increasing overhead as a lot of computations would happen on zero cells. Blend2D rasterizer is universal and was tuned to perform well from small to 4K framebuffers.

When I was designing Blend2D's rasterizer I wrote around 20 rasterizers and benchmarked them against each other in various resolutions. I had similar rasterizers like font-rs (but not using floats) and these were only competing in very small resolutions like 8x8 and 16x16 pixels. When shifting to larger resolutions these rasterizers would always lose as shadow bit-buffer scan is much quicker than going through zero cells, especially if you do pixel compositing.

There are demo samples in bl-samples-qt repository that render animated content and have Blend2D and Qt rendering options. You can check them out to see how the rasterizer competes against Qt.

Let me know if that answers your question.

Blend2D isn't a SVG rendering engine; maybe a SVG rendering engine can be built on top of Blend2D. But anyway SVG specifications are a hell (and these include a lot of features that are not related to the pure rendering). How do i know? I'm one of the developers of https://www.amanithsvg.com

Things like this convince me more and more that SVG is overdesigned and solving the wrong problem:

The world needed a vector version of PNG far more than it needed a vector version of HTML/CSS.