Simplex noise vs Perlin noise

Question

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 algo

Answer 1

I would answer the question bluntly I would say it is because Perlin noise is super simple to get your head around. Simplex noise on the other hand is very much a more complex and hairer beast. Getting a Perlin implementation up and running is much easier than simplex and thus gets more usage. It does not help simplex's case that both are very similiar in the visuals (especially after you manipulate the noise a bit).

Kenneth Perlin himself designed the simplex algorithm for an hardware based implementation and thus made design decisions that make this easier. One example of this can be seen in this quoute, from the patent.

Need for table memory: The original Noise algorithm relied on a number of table lookups, which are quite reasonable in a software implementation, but which in a hardware implementation are expensive and constitute a cost bottleneck, particularly when multiple instances of the Noise function are required in parallel. Ideally, a Noise implementation should not rely on the presence of tables of significant size.