The Trouble with Pentagons: Developing Off the Grid
summary
Implements the cairo pentagonal tiling and measures rendering cost on an iPhone 7 Plus, finding about ~30,000 pentagons could appear on one screen. Uses rectangle bounding to cull overlaps, encodes pentagon data into buffers, and experiments with Metal compute shaders but discovers GPU overhead and integration cost sometimes make a CPU approach faster. Builds a three‑layer renderer, hits roughly 24 fps after optimizations, and shows which parts benefit from parallelization and which do not.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:20Switching to pentagons
- 7:14Key takeaways for impossible designs
- 10:39Pentagon design breakdown
- 14:26Solution with Metal and GPU
- 20:59CPU outperformed GPU
- 22:31Final takeaways
- 28:14Final app demo
