NVIDIA's Warnock renders vector graphics by amplifying GPU geometry
Warnock: Harnessing GPU Geometry Amplification for Vector Graphics
Warnock, a new GPU-accelerated vector graphics library from NVIDIA, exploits GPU tessellation and mesh shaders to fill and stroke paths entirely on the GPU. It stores a path in a single compact buffer that serves both operations, and introduces a pixel-space quality metric for polar tessellation. This approach eliminates CPU tessellation and supports a wide range of rendering modes by simply swapping shaders or buffers, with best performance on modern mesh-shading GPUs.
No prior published path rendering methods operating within the GPU graphics pipeline have: (1) A single compact GPU buffer representation for any path for both filling and stroking. (2) Geometry amplification, culling, and a pixel-space error bound computation operating entirely within the GPU’s efficient programmable graphics pipeline. (3) The ability to support the wide variety of standard 2D vector graphics rendering modes (even projective transforms and texture-based dashing) merely by changing the bound shader program, textures, or GPU buffers.