Rendering beautiful text using MSDFs and Metal.
summary
A music app called Variations uses a real-time infinite canvas UI implemented with Metal and runs at 60 fps immediate mode; text rendering switches from raster glyph atlases to MSDFs sampled in a Metal fragment shader, producing visually sharp glyphs at arbitrary zoom while using the same atlas size and little runtime cost. Built atlases are precomputed offline; watch for minification artifacts and impractical atlas sizes for thousands of Japanese glyphs.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:04Infinite canvas UI
- 3:31Zooming text problem
- 6:01Multi-channel SDFs
- 7:04Signed distance fields
- 9:12SDFs in Metal shaders
- 14:46Single-channel SDF limits
- 16:38How MSDFs work
- 18:04MSDFs in Metal
- 19:53SDF vs MSDF comparison
- 20:35Creating multi-channel SDF atlases
- 20:56MSDF drawbacks
- 21:39Conclusion & Q&A
