A tiny hardware-accelerated pixel frame buffer. 🦀

But why?

Rapidly prototype a simple 2D game, pixel-based animations, software renderers, or an emulator for your favorite platform. Then add shaders to simulate a CRT or just to spice it up with some nice VFX.

pixels is more than just a library to push pixels to a screen, but less than a full framework. You're in charge of managing a window environment, event loop, and input handling.

Features

• Built on modern graphics APIs powered by wgpu: DirectX 12, Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL.
• Use your own custom shaders for special effects. (WIP)
• Hardware accelerated scaling on perfect pixel boundaries.
• Supports non-square pixel aspect ratios. (WIP)

Examples

To demonstrate pixels, I've written a Space Invaders clone. The game logic can be found in the simple-invaders crate. The included example uses simple-invaders to rasterize the image, and pixels to display it. winit provides the windowing and event handling.

cargo run --release --example invaders

See the example's README for more information.

Comparison with minifb

The minifb crate shares some similarities with pixels; it also allows rapid prototyping of 2D games and emulators. But it requires the use of its own window/GUI management, event loop, and input handling. One of the disadvantages with the minifb approach is the lack of hardware acceleration (except on macOS, which uses Metal but is not configurable). An advantage is that it relies on fewer dependencies.