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> Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text Displaying text is surprisingly hard, as one can easily find out if ones dives into the big
by aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
> Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text
Displaying text is surprisingly hard, as one can easily find out if ones dives into the big rabbit hole of font rendering.
- mwcampbell 7mo agoYes, text shaping and layout are complex. My point is that the program wasn't doing anything that should have required a GPU, particularly for the resolutions that were common back then.
- chris_wot 7mo agoI’m knee deep in refactoring LibreOffice code around text rendering. I can assure you, it’s complex but it doesn’t require a GPU!
- bgrainger 7mo agoThe promise was that WPF would use hardware-accelerated libraries such as DirectWrite to put text on the screen even faster than GDI+ (using the CPU) could do. The reality turned out to be quite different: multiple layers of abstraction and just plain inefficient WPF code [1] meant that users needed powerful CPUs and GPUs just to get reasonable performance. [1] https://faithlife.codes/blog/2019/06/improving-wpf-text-display-performance/ https://faithlife.codes/blog/2019/06/improving-wpf-text-disp...