Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by riceart 1126 days ago
It isn’t really though. If this were true rendering text would be super slow - but it isn’t. Text shaping and rendering is done on the CPU on all the major platforms and is simply highly optimized.

And people throw 15 to 20 years ago like it was a long time ago - but OSX Jaguar is more than 20 years old now (that’s the version that brought the current design of 2D desktop rendering with a compositing window manager to Mac OS X)
1 comments
jcelerier 1126 days ago
> It isn’t really though. If this were true rendering text would be super slow - but it isn’t.

I wouldn't say so, I regularly profile my system or apps and text rendering is definitely one of the things that come up the most

link
riceart 1126 days ago
> text rendering is definitely one of the things that come up the most

Ok this doesn’t dispute what I’m saying at all and I would think you would know better. Do you have profiles from 15 or so years ago that show text rendering was a substantially smaller percentage of time.

And if you do - ensure it is comparing apples to apples with subpixel (or at least greyscale) hinting and full featured shaping. Neither of these are related to blitting/blending performance but they are relatively expensive.

Modern text rendering is super expensive (but by modern we’re talking on the order of 15 to 20 years, not yesterday). People are making claims that CPU 2D rendering has gotten more sluggish in that time frame - though nothing fundamental has changed other than the prevalence of “Retina” in some circles - but that isn’t something that has scaled past CPU performance. This all works because historically these systems have been painstaking about only drawing when needed what’s needed.

If anything has changed it’s that - software in general for a number of reasons has gotten much sloppier about this.

And in the case of Mac OS specifically - they continue to throw all kinds of shit in the CPU rendering pipeline. If you just do things yourself and blit to a Metal texture, nothing is fundamentally slower.

I contend that most of what people are claiming are some fundamental hardware changes (that haven’t happened - things are faster across the board but otherwise it’s the same basic stuff) is due to less effective application software methods. For 2D desktop apps the GPU is not the factor some people seem to think it is.

link