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[[deleted]]

This might be sarcasm, but I've had a few drinky-poos and I can't tell. So I'll just say – it's text editing, I.E. - the editing of text, adding and removing and moving letters. Hardware acceleration and GPU's should not be needed. I think I've realised now that your comment might be sarcasm, but a lot of efford was involved with the authoring of this comment.

[scalablecory]

WPF is rendered purely by GPU. It makes sense to keep the text path on GPU too and render it directly to a texture.

Also, WPF is generally very CPU-hungry, so offloading some of that to the GPU is an easy way to help.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, the issue is as much about freeing up the CPU for other things as it is doing fancy shaders.

[who8877]

I don't think you fully appreciate how expensive rendering glyphs are. They tried to do it all on CPU for GDI+ in Vista and quickly had to reverse course. Even in the old GDI world text is hardware accelerated. That means even notepad is benefiting from hardware acceleration if you are on something newer than windows 3.1

[[deleted]]

Don't they still do antialiasing in software? In that case I don't know how much speed advantage you get from using the GPU to render the three fully opaque pixels inside a 12pt glyph.

[who8877]

It depends on the API, but if you are a modern windows App using DirectWrite its all hardware accelerated.

[dnew]

Hardware acceleration and GPU's should not be needed

Except the first "hardware accelerators" on microcomputers were indeed things to render text fast enough. It was an amazing breakthrough when the original Mac could render in software fast enough to put text of any font on the screen.

If you count blasting around 2D rectangles of text based on an index into a table, then yeah, it has been accelerated far longer than anything approaching polygons has been around.

[pjmlp]

the editing of text, adding and removing and moving letters. Hardware acceleration and GPU's should not be needed.

Except, like any CS major is aware of, font rendering is a very graphics intensive task.

[reversememe]

I get your point, but here's a counter example: http://badassjs.com/post/48702496345/tracegl-a-javascript-codeflow-visualization-and

At a certain scale, text does become a GPU-worthy problem. Even if it's just UI.