[pcwalton]

Well, I'm a bit confused as to how this is fill-rate friendlier than something like [1]: if you are drawing and checking the winding rule via the stencil buffer or color buffer, then you're going to overdraw a lot. A technique like [1], on the other hand, only paints each pixel once.

I would think that, compared to the LUT texture approach, this technique is lighter in FS load but more expensive in terms of fill rate/ROP.

[1]: http://wdobbie.com/post/gpu-text-rendering-with-vector-textu...

[Negative1]

Stencil check rejections based on overdraw don't hurt as much as you'd think. Liken it to a clip() (or discard), which is a single instruction. The GPU pipeline optimizes for this.

The approach you linked too is very well thought out but each font still does pixel processing for a bezier curve, which is many orders more expensive than a clip(). Never mind the addition of a dependent read via the LUT and the tracing step.

[vvanders]

A word of caution, not all pipelines are created equal(wrt to stencil/z-test/etc).

One other downside is this technique requires two drawcalls which can be pretty painful on some platforms.

Unless you really need large ranges of scale a glyph atlas based solution will probably be the fastest on a wide range of hardware.