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by cubefox 283 days ago
Stupid question: Why not use the hardware (fixed function) rasterizer inside the GPU? I guess that one is only optimized for triangles.
2 comments

The longer answer is that using straight-edged geometry to represent curves is a resolution-dependent operation, e.g. a full screen circle may need to be flattened to an 80-sided polygon.

Rasterizer can solve quadratic curves in the fragment shaders, which massively reduces the geometry needed for a scene.

Also, the native rasterizer only supports MSAA, which is inferior to reference analytic area AA.

Good question and answer ;-)