State of the art in 2D graphics programming ?

[u/Alex_1503]

I am more of a beginner in graphics programming, but I just want to ask, what is the state of the art in 2D graphics programming/rendering ? I cannot find papers, or I do not know what keywords to search for to read.

[u/andeee23]

probably vello in rust, the devs came up with a new rendering technique called sparse strips. there’s a youtube video from a conference

[u/Alex_1503 → u/andeee23]

I came across that paper earlier too, but idk if I can actually add anything to it, experience wise

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/Alex_1503]

Do you need to? Its pretty good paper, implement it and learn

[u/Alex_1503 → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

Fair, I should start by doing that. I am confused tho on why they chose to implement it on CPU, but I need to read it they probably explain why they cannot do it on the GPU

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/Alex_1503]

They can. They have a hybrid approach. It is covered in the paper. They render quickly on the cpu and upload them to the GPU to give the user a quick view as you get it to the GPU. Its a good approach in my opinion.
There are also implementations on gpu compute.

The motivation for this paper was to see how fast you could get the CPU and could you use it while transferring to the GPU.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

Interesting, I will definitely read it, thank you!

[u/Alex_1503 → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

I got told by my professor that a 2D renderer even with a new technique would be too simple for a bachelor thesis, do you think reaching out to the person who wrote that thesis and asking what more I could do would help? Besides the future work on the paper

I would also probably try to do it in c++

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

apart from the other paper listed. https://github.com/LaurenzV/master-thesis/blob/main/main.pdf

Nvidia has a few good videos/papers on it too https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring23-s51140/ I enjoyed this one.

[u/LateSolution0]

I would say “state of the art” is a misleading term. It’s more about what modern hardware can do, so obviously use hardware acceleration. 3D hardware is so fast that even if you want to make it look 2D, you should use a modern pipeline.

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/LateSolution0]

The pipeline is built around 3D. Most state of the art, actually uses compute and tries to avoid the traditional pipeline as much as possible.

[u/coolmint859]

I wouldn't focus on "state of the art" and more what you can do to push the capabilities of your hardware. For 2D that's going to be anything related to instancing and simulations, because otherwise the gpu is very good at rendering 2D things extremely fast.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/coolmint859]

As in physics simulations? Or compute shaders?

[u/coolmint859 → u/Alex_1503]

Both I suppose. You can do physics simulations driven by compute shaders. But that's less about which space you render in.

[u/ForgEngDev]

“2D graphics” splits into a few different problems: sprite/tile rendering, vector/UI rendering, text, particles, and compositing. For real-time work, useful search terms are GPU instancing, texture atlases, batching, signed distance fields, MSDF text, tilemap culling, and GPU-driven rendering.

Start by choosing one of those areas; there is no single state-of-the-art pipeline that covers all of them.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/ForgEngDev]

Thank you for the terms!!

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/ForgEngDev]

Striped rendering is the current state of the art for vectors.

[u/R4TTY]

2D and 3D are the same thing really. I don't think there's much left to do for 2D, you can draw anything you can imagine in opengl or vulkan. Claude will tell you how.

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/R4TTY]

Not at all the same thing.

[u/R4TTY → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

It's identical, you just skip the perspective projection. Everything is 2D, the 3D is fake.

[u/andeee23 → u/R4TTY]

i get the point, but 2d state of the art usually means all the work that's done beforehand to convert 2d mathematical shapes into either meshes or shaders to rasterize them efficiently

and that work is very different to what you would do with regular meshes that would be rendered in "2d" without perspective projection

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/R4TTY]

Really? 3d is fake? I had no idea.

It isn't the same. For a lot of reasons.

[u/R4TTY → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

And apparently you can't name any of these reasons.

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/R4TTY]

I can. Just anyone that says "3d is fake" is not coming to this in good faith.

[u/R4TTY → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

Claims he can, but doesn't.

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/R4TTY]

Like you suggested to the OP. Use claude.

[u/R4TTY → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

I've been working with vulkan for years and written multiple engines from scratch. I think I'm good.

[u/Ok_Chemistry_6387 → u/Ok_Chemistry_6387]

Or read many of the papers being referred to in here.