Xgl server

[Matthias Hopf]

On Dec 06, 04 10:01:33 -0600, mcnichol at austin.ibm.com wrote:
> Just wondering if you have thought about how well this might scale.
> 
> What's going to happen in a GB18030 locale when you have may have
> to deal with 100,000+ characters?

Even if we assume that we have all 100,000 characters in gfx memory at
once (which I assume we'll never have) this makes 96MB for a 32x32 font.
Assuming the space requirements of games increase like they do at the
moment (HL2 needs 512MB on the gfx card for full res!), we'll soon have
1GB on the gfx side as a standard.

('soon' measured in years here ;)

But even chinese or japanese text typically only uses some 5,000
characters regularly, so this really should not be too problematic.

On the other hand, if every drawn character is unique, we'll have to
download it to the card either way. Either it is directly drawn to the
screen (as with Render), or it is uploaded as a texture and then drawn
to screen by the gfx card. Both techniques require about the same amount
of agp/pcie bandwidth, and the rendering itself can be neglected
performance-wise. So we don't loose anything with a texture font based
approach even in the worst case, while we gain a lot in the best case.

CU

Matthias

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