5 ms·
Unicode is more challenging when you're talking about hardware acceleration. On an Apple //e, displaying a new character required writing 1 byte to a video regi
by dwheeler 3y ago
Unicode is more challenging when you're talking about hardware acceleration. On an Apple //e, displaying a new character required writing 1 byte to a video region. The hardware used that byte to index into a ROM to determine what to display. Today's computers are faster, but they must also transmit more bytes to change the character display.
That said, I can imagine more clever uses of displays might produce significantly faster displays.
- hnlmorg 3y agoModern video acceleration wouldn’t copy 1 byte into video memory even if we stuck to ASCII. They have to blit those characters onto a surface in the required type-face. The extra few bytes for Unicode characters outside of the usual ASCII range is effectively a rounding error compared with the bitmap data you’re copying around.