Re:Ledit: Simple, GPU-rendered, no bullshit text editor
by anthk on Thursday February 24, 2022 @08:26AM
(#30454370)
This. Since XV days, X's 2D rendering has been accelerated by GPU's.
Re:Ledit: Simple, GPU-rendered, no bullshit text editor
by vidarh on Thursday February 24, 2022 @08:37AM
(#30454479)
You don't even need 2D acceleration for this beyond maybe a basic region blit.
Ever since the Amiga days text rendering at sufficient speed to bitmap displays has been a solved problem, with only scrolling accelerated by the blitter, and resolution and number of bits per pixel has increased at a much slower pace than CPU performance since then.
Most X terminals use one of ~3 different basic approaches to glyph rendering anyway (as shown by redirecting them through xtruss to log the X requests they make), and their throughput still varies from far faster than Kitty (as per rxvt) to far slower, so apart from possibly the fastest ones, most of the x terminals spends most of their time outside of their rendering code.
Currently I'm using mlterm which is slower than Kitty again by a significant margin, and I still don't notice the difference in day to day use.
(xterm, st and gnome-terminal are all slower than Kitty by huge margins; of the terminals on my system (I have a lot because I tested a bunch of them a while back...) there's a performance difference in terms of rendering throughput of at least a factor of 10, and yet even the slowest once are perfectly fine for most use other than the cat large file test)