Is such a recent graphics API really necessary? Why isn't a 2D canvas good enough in for this sort of thing?
* Its backend (gfx-rs) is one of the most mature rust libraries for doing graphics
* The popular "classic" 2d libraries like cairo and skia are very big and complicated to build / depend on
* wgpu will eventually also work on the web, so it's a great option for broad platform compatibility
* In terms of efficiency (memory, battery, cpu etc.), the modern graphic APIs have more headroom than the GL-based ones
* Today, 4K screens are pretty common, and in the future, 144hz monitors will be more and more popular. If I want to render 2d graphics with no latency in those setups, access to the GPU makes things feasible
are those not feasible today ? due to vsync & al I still have less latency on apps that do software rendering than hardware, even on a 4K 120hz screen
I ended up targeting 1920x1080@60 and having a shader nearest neighbor scale that up.
I'd expect these kinds of operations to be slow at high resolution without the help of the GPU. You could probably speed things up with SIMD and multi-threading, at the expense of implementation complexity.
VSync, if done properly, only adds less than a single frame of latency.
That is 17ms tops for 60Hz, which nobody notices unless you are a pro-gamer on an FPS game. Certainly it does not matter for a pixel editor.
In terms of comparison with an FPS, the same amount of responsiveness is required for any UI - ie. there should be no perceptual latency.
Adding 17ms certainly is perceptual.
It may be harder than editing a Cargo file, but it is something you do once. They are some of the most mature and tested libraries in the world.
> wgpu will eventually also work on the web, so it's a great option for broad platform compatibility
OpenGL works everywhere today, including the web!
> In terms of efficiency (memory, battery, cpu etc.), the modern graphic APIs have more headroom than the GL-based ones
It doesn't matter for a pixel editor. Even if it did, you would have to do a very good job to beat the driver's GL implementation.
Otherwise, you may end up with something slower or buggier!
> Today, 4K screens are pretty common, and in the future, 144hz monitors will be more and more popular. If I want to render 2d graphics with no latency in those setups, access to the GPU makes things feasible
Perhaps, but again, GL allows you to do that.