3 ms·
It's simply less expensive in most cases to cache the results of rendering when you render the same glyph over and over. GPUs are fast but not infinitely fast,
by modeless 1y ago
It's simply less expensive in most cases to cache the results of rendering when you render the same glyph over and over. GPUs are fast but not infinitely fast, and they are extremely good at sampling from prerendered textures.
Also it's not just about speed, but power consumption. Once you are fast enough to hit the monitor frame rate then further performance improvements won't improve responsiveness, but you may notice your battery lasting longer. So there's no such thing as "fast enough" when it comes to rendering. You can always benefit from going faster.
- account42 1y ago> Once you are fast enough to hit the monitor frame rate then further performance improvements won't improve responsiveness This is not true, if your rendering is faster then you can delay the start of rendering and processing of input to be closer to the frame display time thus reducing input latency.
- modeless 1y agoThis is true but very rarely implemented.
- animal531 1y agoThat's true, but in this case one can cache the output of e.g. a rendered letter and re-use that, without the intermediate SDF etc. steps. Of course for e.g. games that breaks if the font size changes, letters rotate and/or become skewed etc.