GPU accelerated path rendering is one of the single most polar technologies. Things like Bezier curves are defined mathematically, so you can represent the way a tiger looks in a, albeit large, mathematical equation! But due to their usage of maths that computers aren't fast at performing, they are extremely difficult to rasterize in real-time.<p>NVidia's technology to do this has been around for years, but it hasn't 'taken off', I've yet to see anyone use it (maybe Adobe Illustrator uses it?). Khronos (the group who created OpenGL) even has a standard for accelerated vector graphics, called OpenVG, which has also been around for years as well yet only the Raspberry Pi and a few other embedded ARM devices seem to support it.<p>My conclusion? Path rendering is insanely useful, but it's very complex for both application developers ("this is slow and hard") and artists alike ("I hate these weird grabby-handles!"). That complexity comes at a cost, and time after time we've been shown that complexity is often overpowered by simplicity even when it's inferior (bitmap images).<p>I would like to see Quadratic (i.e. a bezier curve with just one control point) become popular due to their artistic simplicity as well as their easy relation to graphics hardware (a triangle with a simple GLSLfragment shader can render a quadratic bezier curve).<p>Perhaps quadratic bezier curves aren't as mathematically pure (cannot represent circles "perfectly") -- but they are artistically beautiful and, in my mind, just as useful as pixels are (in real-time applications). <a href="http://imgur.com/a/i2RtE" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/i2RtE</a>