| I wasn't aware of the use of DirectWrite, thanks. > On Windows, those OpenGL calls are translated to DirectX with a very sophisticated OpenGL translator called Angle (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/gyp/angle.gyp) I'm aware of that. But ANGLE can't possibly be better than Direct3D; in fact, it tends to lag behind new D3D releases for obvious reasons. > Saying that Chrome i.e. in this context Skia, doesn't use Direct2D for rendering is like saying "On Windows Chrome doesn't use native Chakra JavaScript engine". Yet that's still a true statement. And if Chakra were technically ahead of V8, then that would be a valid criticism of Chrome's choice here. > It makes engineering sense for Google to have their own, cross-platform, high-performance 2d rendering engine instead of a thin layer of whatever the common-denominator they could implement on top of 2d functionality provided by the OS. I don't think that's clear at all. Direct2D is very good for what it is (although neither Skia nor D2D is a good API for GPUs really, as NVIDIA and others have pointed out in for example [1]). There's no architectural advantage that Skia has over D2D; they both feature very similar immediate mode APIs. D2D is being improved by Microsoft all the time, with a multi-year head start on Ganesh and the advantage of tight integration with the graphics drivers. In fact, the entire point of Alex's post is to acknowledge that Ganesh's rollout has been slower than that of CG::OGL (Apple's Ganesh equivalent, which has been shipping in stable Safari for a while) and Direct2D (which has been shipping in IE since 9 and Firefox since 4). [1]: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/devzone/devcenter/gameg... |