Tl;dr: SDFs are really slow but cool because they can compactly define complex stuff; demoscene uses it. Sort of the functional programming to trad renderings OOP. Would be cool if it was faster. Optimizing an algorithm for CPU rendering using recursive divide and conquer, 1 core with one object gets 50 fps. 100 fps if you lerp a 10x10 pixel patch instead of doing 1 pixel. Algorithm isn’t optimized, fully. Also, turns out the author’s idea is previously known but somewhat obscure, it is referred to as “cone marching”

Holy crap! The demo is hitting 30 FPS from certain angles, on my decade-old CPU

Played around with the code to implement a little bit of SIMD. Was able to squeeze out a decent improvement, ~250 fps avg, ~140 low, ~333 high (on an m4). Looks pretty straightforward to do threading with as well. Cool stuff! Could work to bring more gpu stuff back down to the cpu.