SDL2 Lands Long-Sought Geometry Render API

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 19 August 2021 at 03:00 AM EDT. 11 Comments
LINUX GAMING
While not making it for last week's SDL 2.0.16 release, merged on Wednesday to the SDL2 development code is an "SDL_GeometryRender" interface that stems from feature requests going back nearly a decade for this graphics API independent triangle rendering API.

Going back to 2012 was a bug report about desiring the ability with SDL to be able to render polygons with an SDL-defined API. And then in 2013 was a patch about adding a SDL_RenderGeometry interface that at the time allowed geometry rendering with OpenGL / OpenGL ES (ES2).

In 2021, SDL_RenderGeometry is being introduced after a lot of work in recent months by developer Sylvain Becker to get SDL to a point where it has its own API for allowing triangles to be rendered with per-vertex colors.

This interface to render a list of triangles is then backed by either software rendering or OpenGL / OpenGL ES / OpenGL ES 2 / Direct3D 9 / Direct3D 11 / Apple Metal depending upon the platform.

This new interface has also been tested to see that it can integrate with the likes of DearImGui, Spine, Nuklear, Libroket, and Microui.

This merge request opened since March and merged yesterday contains more details on this implementation.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week