Right. The question is does Skia grows its broad and useful toolkit with an eye toward further GPU optimization? Or does Vello (broadened and perhaps burdened by Rust and the shader-obsessive crowd) grow a broad and useful API?
There's also the issue of just how many billions of line segments you really need to draw every 1/120th of a second at 8K resolution, but I'll leave those discussions to dark-gray Discord forums rendered by Skia in a browser.
> There's also the issue of just how many billions of line segments you really need to draw every 1/120th of a second at 8K resolution
IMO, one of biggest benefit of a high performance renderer would be power savings (very important for laptops and phones). If I can run the same work but use half the power, then by all means I'd be happy to deal with the complications that the GPU brings. AFAIK though, no one really cares about that and even efforts like Vello are just targeting fps gains, which do correlate with reduced power consumption but only indirectly.
Adding a power draw into the mix is pretty interesting. Just because a GPU can render something 2x faster in a particular test doesn't mean you have consumed 50% less power, especially when we talk about dedicated GPUs that can have power draw in hundreds of watts.
Historically 2D rendering on CPU was pretty much single-threaded. Skia is single-threaded, Cairo too, Qt mostly (they offload gradient rendering to threads, but it's painfully slow for small gradients, worse than single-threaded), AGG is single-threaded, etc...
In the end only Blend2D, Blaze, and now Vello can use multiple threads on CPU, so finally CPU vs GPU comparisons can be made more fairy - and power draw is definitely a nice property of a benchmark. BTW Blend2D was probably the first library to offer multi-threaded rendering on CPU (just an option to pass to the rendering context, same API).
As far as I know - nobody did a good benchmarking between CPU and GPU 2D renderers - it's very hard to do completely unbiased comparison, and you would be surprised how good the CPU is in this mix. Modern CPU cores consume maybe few watts and you can render to a 4K framebuffer with that single CPU core. Put rendering text to the mix and the numbers would start to be very interesting. Also GPU memory allocation should be included, because rendering fonts on GPU means to pre-process them as well, etc...
2D is just very hard, on both CPU and GPU you would be solving a little bit different problems, but doing it right is insane amount of work, research, and experimentation.
It's an argument you can make in any performance effort. But I think the "let's save power using GPUs" ship sailed even before Microsoft started buying nuclear reactors to power them.
Right. The question is does Skia grows its broad and useful toolkit with an eye toward further GPU optimization? Or does Vello (broadened and perhaps burdened by Rust and the shader-obsessive crowd) grow a broad and useful API?
There's also the issue of just how many billions of line segments you really need to draw every 1/120th of a second at 8K resolution, but I'll leave those discussions to dark-gray Discord forums rendered by Skia in a browser.
> There's also the issue of just how many billions of line segments you really need to draw every 1/120th of a second at 8K resolution
IMO, one of biggest benefit of a high performance renderer would be power savings (very important for laptops and phones). If I can run the same work but use half the power, then by all means I'd be happy to deal with the complications that the GPU brings. AFAIK though, no one really cares about that and even efforts like Vello are just targeting fps gains, which do correlate with reduced power consumption but only indirectly.
Adding a power draw into the mix is pretty interesting. Just because a GPU can render something 2x faster in a particular test doesn't mean you have consumed 50% less power, especially when we talk about dedicated GPUs that can have power draw in hundreds of watts.
Historically 2D rendering on CPU was pretty much single-threaded. Skia is single-threaded, Cairo too, Qt mostly (they offload gradient rendering to threads, but it's painfully slow for small gradients, worse than single-threaded), AGG is single-threaded, etc...
In the end only Blend2D, Blaze, and now Vello can use multiple threads on CPU, so finally CPU vs GPU comparisons can be made more fairy - and power draw is definitely a nice property of a benchmark. BTW Blend2D was probably the first library to offer multi-threaded rendering on CPU (just an option to pass to the rendering context, same API).
As far as I know - nobody did a good benchmarking between CPU and GPU 2D renderers - it's very hard to do completely unbiased comparison, and you would be surprised how good the CPU is in this mix. Modern CPU cores consume maybe few watts and you can render to a 4K framebuffer with that single CPU core. Put rendering text to the mix and the numbers would start to be very interesting. Also GPU memory allocation should be included, because rendering fonts on GPU means to pre-process them as well, etc...
2D is just very hard, on both CPU and GPU you would be solving a little bit different problems, but doing it right is insane amount of work, research, and experimentation.
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It's an argument you can make in any performance effort. But I think the "let's save power using GPUs" ship sailed even before Microsoft started buying nuclear reactors to power them.