Modern 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 ty

Modern 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.