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> CPUs are more generic though Which is exactly why you want to save the GPU for what it does best – drawing pixels. > and pretty much every single GPU accele

by comex 7y ago

> CPUs are more generic though Which is exactly why you want to save the GPU for what it does best – drawing pixels. > and pretty much every single GPU accelerated text drawing operation i've seen allocates permanent GPU resources (textures mainly). Makes sense as a concern, and it's not something I've looked into. (I don't use alacritty.) On the other hand, how much memory are we actually talking about? On my system (total screen resolution 2880x1800), a typical terminal glyph has a roughly 14x16 bounding box; let's bump that up to 20x20 to account for padding. Stored as 8-bit RGBA, that would take 1600 bytes. An atlas of "hundreds" of glyphs would then be expected to take up on the order of hundreds of KB... which seems pretty negligible? A larger font, multiple atlases, or more characters per atlas would require more memory, but I still don't see how you get to an amount worth worrying about. I could be missing something.

bigiain 7y ago
I'm sure my rose-tinted glasses memories of the olden days are entirely unfounded, but I've written code using a VT100 plugged into a VAX 11/780, and the first machine I had at home was an Osbourne 1, with a 4kHz Z80 processor and 64kb of ram (the top 4kb of which was the memory mapped video ram)... It seems the increase in utility we've got from being able to use teraflops of massively parallel GPU with Gigabytes of ram available - doesn't exactly match the 6 orders of magnitude or so more resource use... "It scrolls soooo smoothly, and you can use the poop emoji in your source code!!!" ;-) </old_man type='grumpy'>
Crinus 7y ago
One important thing you are missing is that you are focusing on a single instance of a single program doing that. These caches are not shared among programs and unless you are only running a single program at a time in your OS, if every program does such resource abuse (not necessarily this particular type of abuse, but in not caring about resources in general) then you get a slow computer. Computers feel as slow as ever (which was the topic a few nodes above) despite being much faster in theory not because of a single program but because all (or well, the overwhelming majority) the programs in your computer abuse resources - even if a little. It is death from a thousand little abuses.

by comex 7y ago

bigiain 7y ago

I'm sure my rose-tinted glasses memories of the olden days are entirely unfounded, but I've written code using a VT100 plugged into a VAX 11/780, and the first machine I had at home was an Osbourne 1, with a 4kHz Z80 processor and 64kb of ram (the top 4kb of which was the memory mapped video ram)... It seems the increase in utility we've got from being able to use teraflops of massively parallel GPU with Gigabytes of ram available - doesn't exactly match the 6 orders of magnitude or so more resource use... "It scrolls soooo smoothly, and you can use the poop emoji in your source code!!!" ;-) </old_man type='grumpy'>

Crinus 7y ago

One important thing you are missing is that you are focusing on a single instance of a single program doing that. These caches are not shared among programs and unless you are only running a single program at a time in your OS, if every program does such resource abuse (not necessarily this particular type of abuse, but in not caring about resources in general) then you get a slow computer. Computers feel as slow as ever (which was the topic a few nodes above) despite being much faster in theory not because of a single program but because all (or well, the overwhelming majority) the programs in your computer abuse resources - even if a little. It is death from a thousand little abuses.