Implemented the most basic mechanism from ravg.pdf ( https://hhoppe.com/ravg.pdf ) paper, which cost me more than 3 days. Seems like graphics programming is hard. I noticed it helps a lot to build visualizations for all the little preprocessing data structures, to make sure they don't break even in corner cases. Making the shaders hot-reloadable helped a lot too.

The 144 stars shown in the video consist of 720 line segments, and get preprocessed in small tiles (32x32 screen pixels), each of which has a specialized description of the relevant line segments which includes some of the original segments clamped to the cell and as well some added artificial segments to complete the description. The tiles can then get rasterized on the GPU in a conventional vertex/pixel shader pipeline. Each pixel "finds" whether it is inside or outside relative to the segments of its cell. There is proper antialiasing for partially covered pixels, too.

On my computer with a 4K resolution screen, the 144 stars are generated and preprocessed in about 1ms (CPU) and the cells get rastered in about 1ms as well (CPU / GPU (OpenGL)). About 2x this time in debug mode with runtime checking enabled.