raphlinus

Circle involute is one of my favorite curves. It has a particularly nice Cesàro equation: κ = c√s. It also has the unusual property of being its own parallel curve. Thus, if you were to draw a curve u…

The title immediately brings to mind the Osterhout classic, "Always Measure One Level Deeper", [1], and I imagine was probably inspired by it. Also worth revisiting. [1]: https://…

The page mostly talks about image resampling where the goal is more or less preserving all frequencies, but it's also extremely effective at implementing Gaussian blur. Basically, you do n iterat…

Thanks for the kind words and the clarification. I'm sure you're right; I was just multiplying things together without taking into account the different capabilities of the different executi…

Here's my quick take. A top of the line Zen core is a powerful CPU with wide SIMD (AVX-512 is 16 lanes of 32 bit quantities), significant superscalar parallelism (capable of issuing approximately…

It's Euclideon. And it is octtrees. My interpretation after reading a fascinating Reddit thread [1] is that these denials were misdirection. There's definitely new interest in splatting te…

To be precise, this is running in a compute shader (rasterizeSwPass.wgsl.ts for the curious). You can think of that as running the GPU in a mode where it's a type of computer with some frustratin…

Faith Ekstrand has an impressive track record of compiler work and has written a few blog posts[1], [1a]. Her Mastodon[2] is also worth a follow. SPIR-V is important in the compute shader space, espec…

The quadratic solver implementation in kurbo is designed to be fast and reasonably precise for a wide range of inputs. But for a definitive treatment of how to solve quadratic equations, see "The…

Same here, except without the scare quotes. Understanding the natural world is absolutely core to being intellectually curious. And meteors are relevant to our experience on Earth, as are more general…

My understanding is that the HSTX can do twice the bit clock as the frequency of the CPU, as opposed to 1x for RP2040. So 800x480 (60Hz) is possible with no overclocking (295MHz bit clock) and Luke sa…

Ah, you watched my "good parallel computer" talk[﹡] :) If I were going to take it on, I'd start with BVH construction - the H-PLOC paper at the latest HPG [1] looks promising - then tra…

If you want to go hardcore into the frequency domain, may I suggest "A Fresh Look at Generalized Sampling" by Nehab and Hoppe[1]. That said, while a frequency-centric approach works super we…

I don't see how you can support the claim of perfect thin line rendering, it's visibly just not very good. So box filtering logically can't possibly be the best possible quality. Can we…

These are sampling artifacts, but I believe yorbwa is correct in distinguishing these from conflation artifacts, as defined in Kilgard & Bolz. I think of the latter as compositing not commuting ex…

I think the story is a lot more complicated. Talking about "the best possible output quality" is a big claim, and I have no reason to believe it can be achieved by mathematically simple tech…

No, Vello does not analytically find intersections. Compositing is (currently) done by alpha blending, which is consistent with the W3C spec but has its own tradeoffs.

I love to see more work in this space. It's clear that GPU compute is the future of 2D rendering, and we need to explore a bunch of different approaches to find the best one. I especially appreci…

The official deprecation [1] cites "some technical barriers, including ... [macOS support]". I'm not able to speak for Chrome, but my understanding is that these technical barriers incl…

WebGPU is not yet performance competitive with CUDA, in part because the cooperative matrix multiplication ("tensor cores" in Nvidia-speak) extension is not done yet. That in turn depends on…

WebGL compute was not viable, and only existed as an engineering prototype with lots of rough edges. There were a bunch of hard problems that needed to get solved to ship WebGPU. Perhaps in an alterna…

Cheering on the progress. As a long time user of wgpu in Vello, I'm impressed with the progress there. The advanced compute stuff has been working quite well, and it's also got some nice ext…

Yes! The workhorse numerical technique is Chebyshev approximation. Remez exchange usually starts with it, for fine-tuning with respect to a "maximum error" norm, but it also works quite well…

That's a really good reason, and thanks for the writeup! My main point is that I believe there are tons of excellent numerical techniques just waiting to be discovered. Lately I've been expl…

I think it's a great avenue for research. I'm probably not going to work on it myself any time soon, as I have a very full queue of ideas to pursue.

Numerical solutions are better. Having a closed form solution is overrated. For example, the closed form solution for arc length of a quadratic Bézier becomes numerically unstable for curves that are …

That's actually a very good question. To some extent, performance analysis tools may be able to give you high-accuracy timestamps of things involving context switches and other things that can ca…

It continues to be relevant. On modern computers, mobile especially, there are are more and more things that can glitch audio from being actually real-time. Probably one of the worst offenders is powe…