Solved! (was Re: client-side font rendering very very slow in X.org xserver 1.5.3 w/r200: massive fetches from VRAM, why?)

[Michel Dänzer]

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 00:29 +0000, Nix wrote:
> 
> augh! blasted --disable-builtin-fonts, why isn't it the default?

It's gone in Git master, the builtins are always available as a fallback
for the real FontPath now. There's discussion about merging this nice
solution for 1.6.


> but the most significant change from my perspective is that the crude
> little 4-entry glyph cache has raised the performance of font
> rendering by about an order of magnitude.

Yeah, that matches my experience.

> (The performance reduction for non-antialiased client-side fonts is
> probably down to xterm: with konsole, they're equally fast.)

Yeah, it could be that xterm hits one of the cases the glyph cache
doesn't handle well yet. Or maybe it renders each glyph separately
instead of at least a whole line (or as much of it as possible anyway)
at once?


> So it looks like I'm going to be using prerelease X servers, and I owe
> Owen Taylor a beer for implementing the glyph cache and Michel Dänzer
> another beer for making it work with non-antialiased fonts :)

:)


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |                http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer