In the 80's 'glyph rendering' was usually done right in hardware when generating the video signal though (e.g. the CPU work to render a character was reduced to writing a single byte to memory).
I was specifically thinking of bitmapped machines like the Amiga. Granted, e.g. a modern 4K display w/32bit colour requires roughly three orders of magnitude more memory moves to re-render the whole screen with text than an Amiga (typical NTSC display would be 640x200 in 2 bit colour for the Workbench), but ability of the CPU to shuffle memory has gone up by substantially more than that (raw memory bandwidth alone has - already most DDR2 would be able to beat the Amiga by a factor of 1000 in memory bandwidth), but the 68k also had no instruction or data cache, and so the amount of memory you could shuffle is substantially curtailed by the instruction fetching; for larger blocks you could make use of the blitter, but for text glyph rendering the setup costs would be higher than letting the CPU do the job)
> but for text glyph rendering the setup costs would be higher than letting the CPU do the job
Depends on how the glyph rendering is done. Modern GPU glyph/vector renderers like Pathfinder [1] or Slug [2] keep all the data on the GPU side (although I must admit that I haven't looked too deeply into their implementation details).
That part was about the Amiga blitter specifically. The setup cost for small blits and the relatively low speed of the blitter made it pointless for that specific use.