Re:Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
by z3t4 on Thursday September 06, 2018 @02:39AM
(#17924314)
Text rendering is very complex. GPU text rendering is however unlikely to be faster then "native" text rendering. But it could likely make scrolling more smooth.
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Re:Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
by yason on Thursday September 06, 2018 @03:21AM
(#17924466)
Rendering the vector fonts into cached bitmaps is complex. Rendering the final buffer by blitting those bitmaps isn't very.
Smooth scrolling is inherently bounded by the vsync rate of the display. As long as you can render the terminal's pixel buffer with new characters and send it to front for the next flip, all within some portion of the time you have between frames, it's as smooth as it can get. Missing a frame will cause stutter, and make it non-smooth. Given the fact that terminal doesn't necessarily need to render if there are no changes, using GPU seems like an overkill for regular use.