Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console Vs. Graphical Rendering

Author: frontend technical lead, setting high code standards

Edit: This is with Firefox 144 on Ubuntu 22.04

A way faster terminal emulator demo: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

And a terminal rendering benchmark tool: https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench

https://chlumsky.appspot.com/msdf-demo

    ~$ echo $((2 * LINES * COLUMNS)) triangles
    34272 triangles

The original Playstation could do 180 000 textured polygons per second[2], so it could've managed ~5 fps. Of course, you wouldn't render that many chars at its available output resolutions anyway. :)

[1] https://github.com/ctsilva/triangle-rendering-benchmarks#:~:... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specific...

Runs at ~1500 FPS with a 6K screen of full text on my machine even when text is being updated at about the pace of a 150 WPM typist but you only update quads that strictly need to change and store font metrics on the GPU in a buffer. A full screen refresh where you send quad data for 750 Lorem ipsum paragraphs every frame runs at 300 FPS on my hardware.

Bitmaps in ROM on early machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6845

Makes me curious how much of computing is losing perceived speed because we have moved to calculating everything on the fly? Easy example is website layout. Yes, some dynamic sites need to calculate a ton on the fly. Most sites, though, probably don't need to reflow everything nearly as often as they do. And fitting everything into the mechanism that is the document flow remains baffling to me.