[glowcoil]

The document explains above the tiger image (like, directly above it) that it is a test image meant to evaluate a hypothesis about fragment shader scheduling:

> Update (7 May): I did a test to see which threads in the fragment shader get scheduled to the same SIMD group, and there’s not enough coherence to make this workable. In the image below, all pixels are replaced by their mean in the SIMD group (active thread mask + simd_sum)

I cloned the piet-gpu repository and was able to render a very nice image of the Ghostscript tiger: https://imgur.com/a/swyW0gl

[Const-me]

Way better than in the article, but still, I like my results better.

The problematic elements are thin black lines. On your image the lines are aliased, visible for the lines which are close to horizontal but not quite. And for curved thin lines, results in visually non-uniform thickness along the line.

[raphlinus]

The original piet-metal codebase has a tweak where very thin lines are adjusted to thicker lines with a smaller alpha value, which improves quality there. This has not yet been applied to piet-gpu.

One of the stated research goals [1] of piet-gpu is to innovate quality beyond what is expected of renderers today, including conflation artifacts, resampling filters, careful adjustment of gamma, and other things. I admit the current codebase is not there yet, but I am excited about the possibilities in the approach, much more so than pushing the rasterization pipeline as you are doing.

[1]: https://github.com/linebender/piet-gpu/blob/master/doc/visio...

[Const-me]

I have doubts. The reason why rasterizers are so good by now — games been pushing fillrate, triangles count, texture samplers performance and quality for more than a decade.

Looking forward, I’d rather expect practical 2D renderers using the tech made for modern games. Mesh shaders, raytracing, deep learning, and even smaller features like sparse textures. These are the areas where hardware vendors are putting their transistors and research budgets.

None of the features you mentioned is impossible with rasterizers. Hardware MSAA mostly takes care about conflation artifacts, gamma is doable with higher-precision render targets (e.g. Windows requires FP32 support since D3D 11.0).