Live data from Hacker News

High-performance 2D graphics rendering on the CPU using sparse strips [pdf]

github.com

31–36 of 36 posts

Re: High-performance 2D graphics rendering on the CPU using sparse strips [pdf]

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly do remote VNC and X11 access on stuff like raspberry pi zero and in these cases GPU does not work, you won't be able to open a GL context at all. Also whenever i upadte my kernel on archlinux i'm not able to open a gl context until i reboot, so I really need apps that don't need a gpu context just to show stuff

For the Pi Zero you can force a headless HDMI output in the config and then use that instead of a virtual display to get working GPU with VNC.

You can also trick any HDMI output to believe it's connected to a monitor.

One commercial product is:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/ADP4KHEAD/

But I seem to recall there are dirt cheap hacks to do same. I may be conflating it with "resister jammed into DVI port" which worked back in the VGA and DVI days. Memory unlocked - did this to an old Mac Mini in a closet for some reason.

Re: High-performance 2D graphics rendering on the CPU using sparse strips [pdf]

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the pointer, we were not actually aware of this, and the claimed benchmark numbers look really impressive.

there were at least two renderers written for the CM2 that used strips. at least one of them used scans and general communication, most likely both. 1) for the given processor set, where each process holds an object 'spawn' a processor in a new set, one processor for each span. (a) spawn operation consists of the source processor setting the number of nodes in the new domain, then performing an add-scan, then sending…

What's a CM2? I tried searching combined with some graphics related keywords but I just go weird stuff.

Re: High-performance 2D graphics rendering on the CPU using sparse strips [pdf]

#34
post #5

Side question. Is there some kind of benchmark to test the correctness of renderers?

This was the original goal of the Cornell box ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_box , i.e. carefully measure the radiosity of a simple, real-world scene and then see how closely you can come to simulating it). For realtime rendering a common thing to do is to benchmark against a known-good offline renderer (e.g. Arnold, Octane)

That's for realistic 3D rendering, a totally different problem from 2D vector graphics.

Re: High-performance 2D graphics rendering on the CPU using sparse strips [pdf]

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there were at least two renderers written for the CM2 that used strips. at least one of them used scans and general communication, most likely both. 1) for the given processor set, where each process holds an object 'spawn' a processor in a new set, one processor for each span. (a) spawn operation consists of the source processor setting the number of nodes in the new domain, then performing an add-scan, then sending…

What's a CM2? I tried searching combined with some graphics related keywords but I just go weird stuff.

Given the focus on parallelism and communication, maybe the Connection Machine 2?
Post reply on HN