Thanks for your response! I write these blog posts for you and others to understand the technology better.
I didn't invent the Cairo trapezoidal algorithm, I think that was mostly Carl Worth, maybe Keith Packard, but I certainly did do one of the earliest analytical area algorithms in the free software space, which I know inspired other work. It's been quite a ride, I went back and looked at my early work[1], and thought it was impressive that I could render the tiger in 1.5s. Now I'm seeing times in the 300µs range on discrete graphics cards.
16xMSAA is pretty good, and I would say is definitely good enough for most vector art. I consider it not quite good enough for text scaling, and anything less than 16x not acceptable. Desktop cards shouldn't have much trouble with it, but mobile devices might not be capable of it or able to deliver adequate performance.
Of course the upside of MSAA is that it's much easier to solve conflation artifacts, so I imagine we'll end up with some variant of it in additional to the analytical AA; and the latter will continue to be used for almost all glyph rendering.
I didn't invent the Cairo trapezoidal algorithm, I think that was mostly Carl Worth, maybe Keith Packard, but I certainly did do one of the earliest analytical area algorithms in the free software space, which I know inspired other work. It's been quite a ride, I went back and looked at my early work[1], and thought it was impressive that I could render the tiger in 1.5s. Now I'm seeing times in the 300µs range on discrete graphics cards.
16xMSAA is pretty good, and I would say is definitely good enough for most vector art. I consider it not quite good enough for text scaling, and anything less than 16x not acceptable. Desktop cards shouldn't have much trouble with it, but mobile devices might not be capable of it or able to deliver adequate performance.
Of course the upside of MSAA is that it's much easier to solve conflation artifacts, so I imagine we'll end up with some variant of it in additional to the analytical AA; and the latter will continue to be used for almost all glyph rendering.
[1]: https://www.levien.com/svg/