Fastest ortho quads?

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?”.

Fastest ortho quads?

That’s easy. They’re the quads you never draw.