Comment by mwcampbell
4 years ago
I don't think they're actually contradicting themselves there. They know enough about how hard text rendering is to conclude that they're better off delegating it to the team that specializes in that particular area, even though it means they have to settle for a good-enough abstraction rather than winning at a benchmark.
Enterprise deployment of a Somebody Else’s Problem field can really harm innovation,
“Any object around which an S.E.P. is applied will cease to be noticed, because any problems one may have understanding it (and therefore accepting its existence) become Somebody Else's Problem.”
Agree. Rendering text well really is hard, if you sit down and try to do it from scratch. It’s just that dealing with all of the wonderful quirks of human languages doesn’t have to make it _slow_. That’s their mistake.
And you’re right; all refterm really does is move the glyph cache out to the GPU rather than copying pixels from a glyph cache in main memory every frame.