CppCon 2019

Drawing an image or displaying text on the screen is accomplished by a process called rendering. Typically a text based application renders using the CPU while 3D games make heavy use of GPU rendering. It would be ideal if every application were able to render all their graphics and text using hardware acceleration on the GPU. Is this practical, feasible, or realistic?

In this presentation we will provide a brief introduction to graphics terminology and show some of the differences between OpenGL, Direct3D, Vulkan, and Metal, as well as the overall process to render. We will explain what obstacles a developer will encounter using a Graphics API and present useful and practical alternatives.

Several examples will be provided to illustrate the exact steps required to configure and render using a specific Graphics API. Since this is a daunting and overwhelming task we will show strategies to streamline the entire process.

As part of this talk we will explain why rendering text is more complicated than just drawing some letters on the screen. There is a difference between text shaping and font rasterization which matters if you want your application to be readable on all platforms. As an example, we will show the pros and cons of the native text rendering on Windows.

A key part of the talk will introduce the idea of reusable and composable graphics buffers which can reduce the load on the rendering hardware. This approach provides an efficient way to render graphics.

A brief overview of shaders, pipelines, and textures will be shown to illustrate the power of graphics, even for a general purpose GUI application.

Familiarity with C++ is advisable, no prior knowledge of graphics is required however it may be helpful.