In short - it depends on your CPU and your display configuration. On a 640x480 screen, a terminal will probably render fine with low CPU overhead. On a HiDPI s

In short - it depends on your CPU and your display configuration. On a 640x480 screen, a terminal will probably render fine with low CPU overhead. On a HiDPI screen, CPU may have millions of pixels to render for a single terminal window. It's not that different from other application programs IMO. DAWs and VSTs often offload rendering to GPUs to save as many CPU cycles as possible to get the latency down. I love having low latency in my terminals, so I prefer GPU accelerated emulators.