4 ms·
Honestly, there are so few different glyphs on a typical page, and CPUs are so fast, that it usually isn't that hard to just rerender every glyph on CPU and agg
by pcwalton 4y ago
Honestly, there are so few different glyphs on a typical page, and CPUs are so fast, that it usually isn't that hard to just rerender every glyph on CPU and aggressively reuse glyph images in order to hit 60 FPS during pinch zoom, at least for Latin text. CJK may be a different story, but I kind of doubt it.
In 2022, smooth font rendering during pinch zoom is yet another case in which we in the software field dropped the ball, but it didn't matter because hardware picked up the slack.
- moonchild 4y agoI wouldn't say it 'doesn't matter'. We get by, sure; but that doesn't mean the situation is ideal. On my laptop, if I try pinch-zooming, safari seems to do bilinear scaling, and firefox CPU usage will dramatically spike. The former is noticeably ugly; the latter is bad for battery life, and may stutter if work is being done in the background (laptops and phones don't yet have hundreds of cores).
- pcwalton 4y agoI would bet that if you profile Firefox WebRender there very little of the time is actually spent rasterizing glyphs. It takes like 10 microseconds to rasterize a small glyph, it's really nothing. Source: This is what I spent a ton of time profiling in the past. And Safari should just rerasterize glyphs while zooming. In 2022 there's no technical reason why it can't.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mwcampbell 4y ago> In 2022, smooth font rendering during pinch zoom is yet another case in which we in the software field dropped the ball, but it didn't matter because hardware picked up the slack. But just letting hardware pick up the slack hurts people stuck with older hardware, right?