The Compositing Tree (2014)

the whole discourse on the over operator and compositing trees makes a real meal out of something very simple. i'm not sure that "order of compositing doesn't matter" (vs. order in layers) is a particularly deep insight... its the sort of thing we just intuitively know from real-life experience afaik. not worthy of a discussion with trees and equations...

i'd be curious why the author got stuck with compositing frame buffers together though - this is usually very avoidable, even in the cases described, and even on old hardware. i'm guessing there are some /really/ hairy edge case things that are not mentioned...

also, all this talk as if everything is built with dynamic, upload-every-frame, vertex buffers as well, instead of (given that its 2d) some well organised quad renderer... i doubt changing shader/material parameters was the dominant cost somehow.

there are certainly somethings you like to do in 2d (post-processing filters) that are hard in 3d, but drawing your basic stuff isn't one of them - there is no mystical difference between 2d and 3d, one is just a subset of the other - if you ignore the hacky pixel space stuff we do in post (which we can also do over 3d renders) which is a trick of the representation (pixels) and not the geometric space (2d).