> however, when you're rendering to a raster display, raster graphics are always faster unless a bandwidth constraint bites you.

I don't agree with this at all, unless you're hyperfocusing exclusively on the path from VRAM to the display hardware, in which case, you're always outputting to a raster display device no matter what -- physical display hardware that draws vectors natively has been rare, limited to industrial equipment (old-school oscilloscopes, radar monitors, etc.) niche CRT-based arcade games, and the occasional novelty laser display.

> the last step in rendering vector graphics is to copy the rendered image into the framebuffer, which is the only step in rendering raster graphics.

This is where I feel like you're being overly particular in your analysis, because there are almost no mainstream use cases in which uncompressed raster graphics are being stored or transmitted. Certainly the case that sparked this particular subthread -- displaying a line-graphics timeline on a website, and debating whether SVG would have been a better solution than the PNG that was used -- the relevant performance metric is overall time-to display for images of equivalent visual quality.

The comparison here is between the time it takes to transmit, decompress, and display a PNG vs. the time it takes to transmit, render, and display an SVG. The 'display' phase factors out, because once the final image is rendered/decoded, the process to send it to the display hardware is the same. So what matters is the transmission time needed to send the file plus the computational time necessary to decompress (for raster) or render (for vector).

And my point is that both of these scale much more rapidly for raster images than for vector ones. File sizes are larger for higher resolution images, so they take longer to transfer, whereas the same vector file can be rendered at any resolution, so transfer time is constant. Decompression time also scales much more significantly for larger raster images than computation time does for rendering vector images. So at higher resolutions, all things being equal, I expect vector graphics to perform faster more often than raster graphics do.

Obviously, there are lots of other granular variables, so this isn't a deterministic rule. A massively complex SVG, e.g. with tens of thousands of polygons, curves, and fills, will likely be slower to render than a high-resolution PNG of the same will be to decompress.

> an svg that one renderer handles fine may bog down another one. generally speaking that isn't a problem with raster formats, not for any deep theoretical reason but just because they're simpler

In theory, that's true. In practice, there are a small number of renderers in widespread use, all of which have testable performace. In this case, we are talking about web browsers, nearly all of which use one of two renderers.

> generally speaking that isn't a problem with raster formats, not for any deep theoretical reason but just because they're simple

They're simple in the sense that they are ultimately always encoding a grid of pixel values, but they're not necessarily computationally simpler due to the amount of processing necessary to compress/decompress them.

> your historical accounts are a bit wrong. naplps and ripscrip never achieved significant adoption because gif was already widespread, and people used plenty of raster graphics in flash

NAPLPS defined the entirety of the user interface to one of the major pre-internet online services starting in the 1980s (Prodigy), and itself predates GIF by nearly a decade. RIPscrip achieved near universal adoption in the BBS world for a few years prior to the internet taking off. These solutions were the only effective way to create full-screen graphical environments for bandwith-constrained remote applications at the time.

GIF was first developed in 1987, and was initially used primarily for file uploads of images that were inherently raster (e.g. scanned photos, complex artwork, etc.) or for small icons to be uploaded once and cached locally for use in graphical interfaces. And GIF was only viable for these uses because of its compression.

Flash was primarily a vector format (into which compressed raster images could be embedded), and had huge adoption as a vector animation tool on the early web precisely because there was no other way to do vector graphics on the web, and bandwidth was neither fast enough nor codecs efficient enough to be viable for these use cases until very recently, relatively speaking.