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Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

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Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#51

Post by spoiler »

microcolonel wrote: post #44
mattdesl wrote: post #30

Great work! Is there any WebGL source available? The demo runs very poorly on my 15" MBP (late 2013, Intel Iris Pro). I'm not sure if it's just the sheer number of glyphs being rendered at once, or whether it's something specific that this GPU is having trouble with. Some related links for those interested in WebGL text rendering: 1 - https://github.com/Jam3/three-bmfont-text 2 - http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/material-d…

It's probably Apple's custom intel HD graphics driver. I'm getting 60fps on an intel HD Graphics 4400 on linux.

Whole PC freezes (except the cursor) with GeForce GT 610 in Chrome (Linux) on the demo. Can't even switch to another tty to kill the process. The PC is average otherwise (AMD FX 8320 with 8GB of RAM).

Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#52

Post by Qantourisc »

jon-wood wrote: post #48
watmough wrote: post #2

Exactly what I needed, just as I was about to start screwing with distance fields or the like. THANK-YOU! Edit: I may have spoken slightly too soon, not since the technique isn't awesome, but because this isn't yet usable without an atlas generation tool that I don't know how to build. As far as performance goes, this is rendering a 124-page PDF (I know, just the glyphs...) utterly without lag using the GPU, on a 16…

I find it curious the number of people in this thread being amazed that high end i7 processors and graphics cards designed for gaming can passably render some text. Is there something I'm missing?

It's not so much they are amazed it capable of doing this. But more of a WOW this is fast compared to rendering theses slow PDF pages on the CPU.

It's a bit like saying: wow this rocket propelled car is fast. Are we surprised it is faster ? No. Are we like: "wow we could go faster !"? Yes

To be fair, I don't understand why we don't have a lib, or even this stuff build into OpenGL/Direct3D. We are doing raster work CPU's. It's relatively slow.

Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#54

Post by vidarh »

jon-wood wrote: post #48
watmough wrote: post #2

Exactly what I needed, just as I was about to start screwing with distance fields or the like. THANK-YOU! Edit: I may have spoken slightly too soon, not since the technique isn't awesome, but because this isn't yet usable without an atlas generation tool that I don't know how to build. As far as performance goes, this is rendering a 124-page PDF (I know, just the glyphs...) utterly without lag using the GPU, on a 16…

I find it curious the number of people in this thread being amazed that high end i7 processors and graphics cards designed for gaming can passably render some text. Is there something I'm missing?

The something you're missing is that we're used to see this done on the CPU, and it's not something CPUs are good at: Pages full of text rendered with scalable fonts involves either a huge number of bezier curves etc. or a huge number of small blits, though you can trade some of it off by spending huge amounts of memory pre-rendering and caching (but if you cache bitmaps at the character level, you will find it harder to do really nice typography - ligatures etc.).

It's not that it's that amazing that it's possible on a GPU, but that it's amazing to see the difference.

Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#55

Post by mangecoeur »

davej wrote: post #5
watmough wrote: post #2

Exactly what I needed, just as I was about to start screwing with distance fields or the like. THANK-YOU! Edit: I may have spoken slightly too soon, not since the technique isn't awesome, but because this isn't yet usable without an atlas generation tool that I don't know how to build. As far as performance goes, this is rendering a 124-page PDF (I know, just the glyphs...) utterly without lag using the GPU, on a 16…

It's very laggy and slow on a quad i7 16GB Macbook Pro. Presumably this is because of the retina display.

Getting perfectly smooth performance on a similar quad i7 16GB Macbook Pro under Firefox 43... perhaps a browser issue?

Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#56

Post by anon4 »

piotrkaminski wrote: post #46
rasz_pl wrote: post #23

no subpixel rendering or hinting. Im confused - is there a problem with cpu rendered fonts that needs fixing? I didnt notice anything wrong last time I was reading schematics and datasheets on 4K monitor.

Don't know why you're getting downvoted. More performance is certainly always good, but without subpixel anti-aliasing the text will tend to look pretty crappy absent a ridiculously high resolution display.

Eh, nowadays you're probably rendering on a phone screen with a PenTile display and 300ppi, so the entire thing is moot.

Plus, every implementation of subpixel hinting I've seen (and I've seen them all, on all three major desktop platforms), produces absolutely disgusting colour fringing.

Just lay off the ClearType(tm) kool-aid and do normal anti-aliasing. We don't do colour-fringing anti-aliasing for any other geometric primitive, I see no reason to implement a font-specific approach that only works if the user is colour-blind.

Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#58

Post by joosters »

vidarh wrote: post #54
jon-wood wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it curious the number of people in this thread being amazed that high end i7 processors and graphics cards designed for gaming can passably render some text. Is there something I'm missing?

The something you're missing is that we're used to see this done on the CPU, and it's not something CPUs are good at: Pages full of text rendered with scalable fonts involves either a huge number of bezier curves etc. or a huge number of small blits, though you can trade some of it off by spending huge amounts of memory pre-rendering and caching (but if you cache bitmaps at the character level, you will find it harde…

Sorry to sound like an old fart, but computers have been doing this for years, and no, caching rendered glyphs does not eat huge amounts of memory. e.g. RiscOS on ancient ARM processors, drawing sub-pixel anti-aliased text on a CPU that had no floating point. Even just 64kb of font cache to store the bitmaps could keep everything running blazingly fast.

Of course, the font renderers have gotten smarter, and of course, screen resolutions have increased, but the difficulties inherent in font renderering are all at the small scale, where you want text to remain crisp even when using only a few pixels.

Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#59

Post by panic »

derefr wrote: post #50
pcwalton wrote: post #27

This is really neat. Though in practice if you are using this kind of thing I'm pretty sure you will want to combine it with atlasing (i.e. construct an atlas of glyphs via render to texture). That's because it's a waste of time to rerasterize glyphs in the FS every frame (which appears to be 200+ lines) instead of caching the results and reducing the per-frame work to a 5-line FS that just blits. In most apps pans a…

There's also the higher level—the thing web browser rendering engines do, where you generate a texture for each "tile" (single-layer viewport rectangle) of likely-to-be-static text, and carry those around until you have to zoom or the text changes. I'm not sure if you need the medium-level (font atlasing) if you have both lower-level (bezier-curve atlasing), and higher-level (pre-composited "tiles.") This is one of t…

The font atlas is definitely still worth it. For example: your comment, which fits in a single browser tile, is made up of 735 drawn glyphs. There are 50 distinct glyphs used (not counting italics because I'm lazy).

Assuming it takes twice as long to draw a glyph into an atlas but half as long to draw it once it's in the atlas, an atlas that starts completely empty will speed up text drawing for your comment by 66% (735 divided by 50 * 2 + (735 - 50) * 0.5, which is 442.5). And this underestimates the savings by a lot (drawing glyphs from an atlas is much more than two times as fast, and some glyphs are probably in the atlas already).

Re: Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures

#60

Post by monk_e_boy »

mattdesl wrote: post #30

Great work! Is there any WebGL source available? The demo runs very poorly on my 15" MBP (late 2013, Intel Iris Pro). I'm not sure if it's just the sheer number of glyphs being rendered at once, or whether it's something specific that this GPU is having trouble with. Some related links for those interested in WebGL text rendering: 1 - https://github.com/Jam3/three-bmfont-text 2 - http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/material-d…

Works fine on my nvidia 620m
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