| > If you've got 1000 glyphs at a specific visual size to pre-cache into alpha-mask textures; How often does that happen? There are definitely languages where that is a plausible scenario (eg, Chinese), but for the majority of written languages you have well under 100 glyphs of commonality for any given font style. And then as you noted, you cache these to an alpha texture. So you need all of those 1000 glyphs to show up in the same frame even. > Especially on a modern low-power system (e.g. a cheap phone), where you might only have 2-4 slow CPU cores, but still have a bounty of (equally slow) GPU cores sitting there doing mostly nothing? But the GPU isn't doing nothing. It's already doing all the things it's actually good at like texturing from that alpha texture glyph cache to the hundreds of quads across the screen, filling solid colors, and blitting images. Rather, typically it's the CPU that is consistently under-utilized. Low end phones still tend to have 6 cores (even up to 10 cores), and apps are still generally bad at utilizing them. You could throw an entire CPU core at doing nothing but font rendering and you probably wouldn't even miss it. The places where GPU rendering of fonts becomes interesting is when glyphs get huge, or for things like smoothly animating across font sizes (especially with things like variable width fonts). High end hero features, basically. For the simple task of text as used on eg. this site? Simple CPU rendered glyphs to an alpha texture is easily implemented and plenty fast. |