[DaoVeles]

I think the above was a simplification. GUI rendering is a good example of jack of all trades, master of none. It doesn't use tight render loops like game engines but it much more flexible in terms of UI possibilities.

There is also the issue that GPU's are oddly terrible at generating 2D elements of which a desktop has thousands of them. There are things like Glyph caching but they can only go so far.

Having the CPU doing the majority of the work with a few rasterization tasks to the GPU makes sense.

[phatskat]

> There is also the issue that GPU's are oddly terrible at generating 2D elements

I never knew this and honestly I’m a bit baffled - 2D seems simpler on its face, is it just that GPUs have been made with gaming in mind (typically) and most “hardcore gamers” are playing 3D games?

[hnuser123456]

I can't find it right now, but I recall reading an article years ago where a newer, more powerful generation of GPUs turned out to have much less hardware for 2D operations/calls, and a fraction of the 2D performance, but the performance in 3D games went up so nobody really noticed.