Real-Time GPU Vector Graphics SDF Generation Based on Quadratic Stroke Rendering

摘要

Signed distance fields (SDFs) and their multi-channel variants (MSDFs) are widely recognized as an effective and practical solution for high-quality, real-time vector graphics rendering. However, generating these fields remains a significant CPU-bound bottleneck, limiting their use in dynamic, interactive applications. This paper introduces a novel, GPU-accelerated algorithm that reframes SDF generation as a parallel quadratic stroke rendering problem. By leveraging the GPU’s tessellation and fragment evaluation pipeline, we parallelize distance calculations for every pixel within a stroke’s influence region. We introduce a localized sign-resolution scheme and a shader-based pipeline that merges per-curve distances using efficient atomic operations. Our results demonstrate a substantial speedup over state-of-the-art CPU libraries like MSDFGen and Skia while maintaining comparable visual accuracy. This performance breakthrough enables real-time generation of distance fields for dynamic user interfaces and on-the-fly synthetic data creation.