Comment by ben-schaaf
1 day ago
GPUs don't have infinite vertex/pixel drawing capabilities. Rendering text directly is simply more expensive. Yes, you can do it, but you'll be giving up a portion of your frame budget and increasing power usage for no real benefit.
To expand on this, GPUs cannot rasterize text directly because they only work with triangles. You need to either implement the rasterization in shaders or convert the smooth curves in the font into enough triangles that the result doesn't look different (number of triangles required increases with font pixel size).