At first I considered the subject “Display list(s) for glyphs”, but even that it was conveying my particular scenario, it still wasn’t a good fit.
What I had in mind was more “Drawing, potentially a load of, quads to display characters”.
Old-school and well-known, right? Well, performance-wise perhaps not quite. I remember a time when nvidia display lists worked miracles (performance-wise) compared to ATI (I know it’s unfair to compare them, but for the users I see this is basically “the two main fighters” - even that I today would also want to know how Intel behaves here with some of their integrated creations).
Has anyone got some recent experience with this, preferrably on a multitude of “generations” of chips - both current and 1-n “generations” back, or know some place that collects this kind of performance info (even that I expect it to be a function of both h/w and the driver)? CPU/[VG]PU is obviously important too - if it runs like a bat out of hell using a fictional 62GHz P4 using ATI 7000 or TNT2 and crawls using a more normal CPU but the latest and fastest gfx card from a vendor that says something too.
Perhaps my question is simply boiling down to (but I don’t know) if other vendors catched up with nvidia as of 5 years ago, and if so at what versions - or simply “Is it today viable (i.e. “so fast you shouldn’t have to bother with manual VBO’s and indices”) to use display lists for glyphs on all implementations?”.