Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
1–10 of 212 posts
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#2"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework"
I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications.
"When we started building Zed, arbitrary 2D graphics rendering on the GPU was still very much a research project."
What are you talking about? JUCE has had GPU-accelerated spline shapes and SVG animations since 2012?
BTW, I like the explanations for how they use SDFs for rendering basic primitives. But that technique looks an awful lot like the 2018 GPU renderer from KiCad ;) And lastly, that glyph atlas for font rendering is only 1 channel? KiCad uses a technique using RGB for gradients so that the rendered glyphs can be anti-aliased without accidentally rounding sharp corners. Overall, this reads to me like they did not do much research before starting, which is totally OK, but then they shouldn't say stuff like "did not exist" or "was still a research project".
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#3"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework" I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications. "Wh…
It's not the first text editor either, Sublime has GPU-accelerated rendering.
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#4"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework" I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications. "Wh…
It's not the first text editor either, Sublime has GPU-accelerated rendering.
Also, looking at their own performance numbers, it appears that all of this only managed to reduce the character insertion latency by 21% when compared to CLion. That's still useful, but maybe not even noticeable to the user.
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#5[dead]
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#6"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework" I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications. "Wh…
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Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#7"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework" I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications. "Wh…
I agree with your final statement and the seeming lack of research, but are you sure your characterization of JUCE is accurate?
You’d surprise a lot of people if you were right about it using GPU acceleration for its UI framework. It does have an OpenGL container that fits into its view object hierarchy if you want to write your own accelerated component, but the rest of the UI is pretty much standard event-loop -> platform-API dispatch. It’s accelerated where the underlying platform-API is accelerated but not in any kind of explicit or fine-tuned way. The focus has always been more on portability than performance, even on the audio side.
(And of course the high-priority audio processing runs in an entirely segregated context from the UI, so the performance characteristics of the two pieces are decoupled anyway.)
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#8"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework" I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications. "Wh…
Maybe you need to add an "(in Rust)" to all these sentences? Sure there are C++ frameworks, but they probably wanted a pure Rust UI framework?
My 2 cents: it's nice to have smooth rendering in your editor, but I'm currently mostly using a Java-based IDE (IDEA family), and it's responsive enough for my taste. If I were to use the current prototype of their editor, I'm afraid the usage of fixed-width fonts all over the place (which I assume can be fixed, but may also be due to constraints of the UI framework?) would probably bother me more than the 120 FPS UI would impress me (assuming that I had a monitor that was fast enough, which I don't). On the plus side, it sounds like they support sub-pixel rendering - if that's the case, kudos to them!
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#9"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework" I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications. "Wh…
> What are you talking about? JUCE has had GPU-accelerated spline shapes and SVG animations since 2012?
I'm not familiar at all with JUCE, but the state of the art in GPU-accelerated 2D graphics has dramatically improved over the past 10 years so I doubt what JUCE did in 2012 is really comparable.
Re: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
#10"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework" I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications. "Wh…
> KiCad uses a technique using RGB for gradients so that the rendered glyphs can be anti-aliased without accidentally rounding sharp corners.
This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”.