[revelation]

Of course they do, modern games are a complex interaction of many different shaders operating on all levels of abstraction on many different classes of runtime data that they compose, renew and adapt many many times in 16 ms.

Is the whole CSS debacle a particularly unlikely concept to yield anything close to a reasonable performing implementation? Sure, but that is because nobody has applied the pressure necessary. People won't play a game that doesn't consistently meet a 30 ms deadline but they seem to happily put up with 3 seconds to final render and call it "amazing".

[Manishearth]

Shaders are a completely different thing from styling (cascading).

GPUs work here because games fundamentally operate on a list-like datastructure (the display list), with little interdependence.

Styling on the other hand operates on a tree like datastructure (the DOM), with lots of interdependence.

Cascading isn't something games need at all, and if it was, it could be precomputed. THis can't be done in webpages.

[mianos]

Game engines are pretty much completely sitting on complex tree structures. Way more than the DOM. The main reason the DOM all looks so tricky is it is a hack on a hack on a hack. A lot of game engines have been rewritten from scratch many times over.

[Manishearth]

Yes, trees are involved in games too, but not at the level I'm talking about.

You don't have analogues for tree-structure-based "selectors" and anything more than straightforward property inheritance (e.g. inheritance of transformations in a skeleton) in game engines. CSS is much more complex in this aspect.

The DOM having lots of legacy issues is not the reason styling is slow.

CSS is designed for a lot of flexibility and can't be precompiled, which is why it is slow to style.