[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.