| > Could performance of the GPU-based rasterizer ever get to the point that WebRender's glyph cache is no longer needed? I would like to try eliminating the frame-to-frame glyph cache. Doing so would reduce load on the texture atlas allocator, which can get slow as it's approximating an NP-complete problem. For me, Pathfinder can rerasterize the entire ASCII character set in 1.5ms or so (depending on the font size), which easily fits under the frame budget. > After glancing quickly at the code, it looks like the lorem ipsum example renders to a texture atlas. Is that part of Pathfinder or just part of that example? Pathfinder's API is based around the concept of an atlas in order to improve batching. Especially at small sizes it's a lot more efficient to render multiple glyphs all in one go without issuing separate draw calls for each one. There's nothing preventing you from making a separate "atlas" for each glyph if you want, though you'll pay some performance cost for this. > How does/will Pathfinder support ligatures? Ligatures are just glyphs like any other. If you want to use ligatures, you can run a full-featured OpenType shaper, like HarfBuzz or Core Text, on your text before sending the resulting glyphs to Pathfinder to be rendered. |
> Pathfinder's API is based around the concept of an atlas in order to improve batching.
And the result of a raster job is then coordinates in the Atlas?
> Especially at small sizes it's a lot more efficient to render multiple glyphs all in one go without issuing separate draw calls for each one.
Makes sense
> There's nothing preventing you from making a separate "atlas" for each glyph if you want, though you'll pay some performance cost for this.
It's not exactly an atlas then is it :P. Sorry if I wasn't clear; I was trying to understand whether the library or the application is managing the Atlas. Sounds like the library.