Comment by leecommamichael
5 days ago
It doesn't need to. It's typical to do this these days, but they could still arrange all of the pixels on the CPU and then blit it onto the screen. There's an API to do so in every major OS.
Since it's more than quick enough to do this on the CPU, they're likely doing it for things like animations and very high quality font rendering. There's image-processing going on when you really care about quality; oversampling and filtering.
I suspect one could do most everything Zed does without a GPU, but about 10 to 20% uglier, depending on how discerning the user is on such things.
> Since it's more than quick enough to do this on the CPU
This is true until it isn't. A modern-ish CPU at 1080p 60hz it'll be fine. At 4k 120hz even the fastest CPU on the market won't keep up. And then there's 8k.
> they're likely doing it for things like animations and very high quality font renderin
Since they're using native render functions this probably isn't the case.
I’m almost nerd-sniped enough to try and see exactly where it breaks down.
What’s a native render function? Do you mean just using a graphics API as opposed to an off-the-shelf UI library?
> What’s a native render function?
As in using DirectWrite or GDI on Windows; or Core Text on macOS. As opposed to shipping your own glyph rasterizer.
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