Comment by simonask

15 days ago

That’s not the slow part. The slow part is moving any data at all to the GPU - doesn’t super matter if it’s a megabyte or a kilobyte. And you need it there anyway, because that’s what the display is attached to.

Now, the situation is that your display is directly attached to a humongously overpowered beefcake of a coprocessor (the GPU), which is hyper-optimized for calculating pixel stuff, and it can do it orders of magnitude faster than you can tell it manually how to update even a single pixel.

Not using it is silly when you look at it that way.

I'm kinda weirded out by the fact that their renderer takes 3ms on a desktop graphics card that is capable of rendering way more demanding 3D scenes in a video game.

Sure, use it. But it very much shouldn't be needed, and if there's a bug keeping you from using it your performance outside video games should still be fine. Your average new frame only changes a couple pixels, and a CPU can copy rectangles at full memory speed.

I have no problem with it squeezing out the last few percent using the GPU.

But look at my CPU charts in the github link upthread. I understand that maybe that's due to the CPU emulating a GPU? But from a thousand feet, that's not viable for a text editor.

  • Yeah LLVMpipe means it's emulating the GPU path on the CPU, which is really not what you want. What GPU do you have out of interest? You have to go back pretty far to find something which doesn't support Vulkan at all, it's possible that you do have Vulkan but not the feature set Zed currently expects.

    • It was ASUS GeForce GT710-SL-2GD5 . I see some sources putting at at 2014. That's not _recent_ recent, but it's within the service life I'd expect.

      (Finger in the air, I'd expect an editor to work on 20 year old hardware.)

      Sold it ages ago. New one (Intel) works fine.

      I was running Ubuntu. I forget which version.

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