Fast UI Draw

Fast UI Draw is a library that provides a higher performance Canvas interface. It is designed so that it always draws using a GPU.

In contrast to many common implementations of Canvas drawing, Fast UI Draw has that changes in clipping are very cheap and optimized for GPU's. In addition, Fast UI Draw has, with the GL backend, very few pipeline states. Indeed an API trace of an application using Fast UI Draw will see only a handful of draw calls per frame, even under high Canvas state trashing, and high clip state changes. Indeed, for the GL backend, only one Canvas state change invokes a pipeline state change: changing the blend mode.

In addition, Fast UI Draw gives an application the ability to make their own shaders for custom drawing.

Documentation

Fast UI Draw uses doxygen for documentation, build and view documentation by:

• make docs
• xdg-open docs/html/index.html

The documentation is available online here.

GL requirements

The GL backend requires GL version 3.3. To support the blend modes beyond those of Porter-Duff blend modes either GL_EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch or GL_ARB_shader_image_load_store with one of GL_INTEL_fragment_shader_ordering, GL_ARB_fragment_shader_interlock or GL_NV_fragment_shader_interlock is required.

The GLES backend requires GLES version 3.0. If the GLES version is 3.0 or 3.1, it is strongly recommended that one of the extension GL_OES_texture_buffer or GL_EXT_texture_buffer is present. For GLES 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2, it is strongly recommended for performance to have GL_APPLE_clip_distance or GL_EXT_clip_cull_distance. To support the blend modes beyond those of Porter-Duff blend modes either GL_EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch or GLES 3.1 with GL_NV_fragment_shader_interlock is required. The Porter-Duff composition modes do not require any extensions though, but the extension GL_EXT_blend_func_extended will improve performance.

Intel GPU's starting in IvyBridge have the extensions support for optimal performance with all blend modes in both GL and GLES for recent enough versions of Mesa. For MS-Windows, the Intel drivers for Intel GPU's also have support for optimal performance with all blend modes.

Building requirements

• GNU Make
• g++ (clang should be fine too)
• freetype
• flex
• perl
• up to date GL (and GLES) headers
  • You need
    • for GL, from https://www.opengl.org/registry/: GL/glcorearb.h, KHR/khrplatform.h
    • for GLES, from https://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/: GLES2/gl2.h, GLES2/gl2ext.h, GLES3/gl3.h, GLES3/gl31.h, GLES3/gl32.h, KHR/khrplatform.h
  • The expected place of those headers is set by setting the environmental variable GL_INCLUDEPATH; if the value is not set, the build system will guess a value. The name of the header files is controlled by the environmental variables GL_RAW_HEADER_FILES for GL and GLES_RAW_HEADER_FILES for GLES. If a value is not set, reasonable defaults are used.
• SDL 2.0 and SDL Image 2.0 (demos only)
• doxygen (for documentation)

Building

"make targets" to see all build targets and the list of environmental variables that control what is built and how. On MS-Windows, the helper library NEGL is NOT built by default and on other platforms it is.

MacOS build is possible, but is NOT done with the GL headers that are included in MacOS. Instead copy the needed Khronos headers to /usr/local/include with the tree intact, i.e. copy GL/glcorearb.h from the Khronos registry to /usr/local/include/GL/glcorearb.h and copy KHR/khrplatform.h to /usr/local/include/KHR/khrplatform.h. Then the build process will work (the build system defaults GL_INCLUDEPATH to /usr/local/include on OS-X). Yes, this is a hack.

Running Demos

The demos (naturally) link against the FastUIDraw libraries, thus they need to be in the library path. For Unix platforms, this is done by appending the path where the libraries are located to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. A simple quick hack is to do export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH. All demos have options which can be see by passing --help as the one and only command line option to the demo.

Installing

Doing "make INSTALL_LOCATION=/path/to/install/to install" will install fastuidraw to the named path. Demos are NOT installed! The default value of INSTALL_LOCATION is /usr/local, change as one sees fit. Placement is as follows:

• INSTALL_LOCATION/lib: libraries
• INSTALL_LOCATION/lib/pkgconfig: pkg-config files
• INSTALL_LOCATION/include: header files
• INSTALL_LOCATION/bin: fastuidraw-config script (and .dll's for MinGW)
• INSTALL_LOCATION/share/doc/fastuidraw: documentation

Using project

After installation, the script, fastuidraw-config, is available and copied to INSTALL_LOCATION/bin. Use the script to get linker and compile flags for building an application. Alternatively, one can also use pkg-config.

Notes

• FastUIDraw has the main meat in libFastUIDraw, there are two variants the release and debug version whose pkg-config module names are fastuidraw-release and fastuidraw-debug.
• The GL backend of FastUIDraw is libFastUIDrawGL, there are two variants the release and debug version whose pkg-config module names are fastuidrawGL-release and fastuidrawGL-debug.
• The GLES backend of FastUIDraw is libFastUIDrawGLES, there are two variants the release and debug version whose pkg-config module names are fastuidrawGLES-release and fastuidrawGLES-debug.
• The debug and release versions of the libraries should not be mixed; if you are building for release, then use the release versions and the release flags. If you are building for debug use the debug libraries and the debug flags. One can get the flag values by using either pkg-config or the script fastuidraw-config.

Successfully builds under

• Linux
• MinGW64 and MinGW32 of MSYS2 (https://msys2.github.io/)