Simplex noise vs Perlin noise

Viewed 33053

I would like to know why Perlin noise is still so popular today after Simplex came out. Simplex noise was made by Ken Perlin himself and it was suppose to take over his old algorithm which was slow for higher dimensions and with better quality (no visible artifacts).

Simplex noise came out in 2001 and over those 10 years I've only seen people talk of Perlin noise when it comes to generating heightmaps for terrains, creating procedural textures, et cetera.

Could anyone help me out, is there some downside of Simplex noise? I heard rumors that Perlin noise is faster when it comes to 1D and 2D noise, but I don't know if it's true or not.

Thanks!

8 Answers

simplex noise looks worse imho, and lots of people think it looks "increasingly bad" in higher dimensions. I'd still recommend it over perlin for most applications, as most won't be using just raw simplex but octaves of it which looks roughly the same as octaves of perlin and is significantly faster for octaves.

Related