This website almost crashed my m1 macbook pro (renders at 1 fps or something), so I guess point taken: rendering text is not simple!

This is "an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation".

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...

SDF seems to be one of the better solutions for text rendering.

Valve had this problem solved since 2007. I'd argue this technique is a big part of what gave TF2 its impressive visual style. That game ran at 100+ fps on hardware like the 8800GT at the time.

https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2403-distance-field-fonts/

Stupid question but what are the units used in the results tables??

Meta: this is kind of a repost, not even a month since last time [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580559

I wonder how the GPU version is implemented. One quad and one texture draw per glyph sounds very not scalable, but one quad per terminal, one texture atlas and one shader to draw glyphs from the atlas already sounds much better.