Use many little Textures or one big?

Hi,

There may be similar questions, so i am going to define my problem as accuratly as possible.
I am currently working on a .tff and other font formats support for my text rendering code.
While i was optimizing my existing code I noticed, that each character has its own texture,
which gets loaded into the shader each time the character is used. So would it be more efficient
to merge all those little textures for each character into one big texture, which is loaded at the
initialisation of the font-rendering-system into the shader or to use those little textures, but therefore
each time?

Thank you very much for your help! (and sorry for the typos)

One large texture will be more efficient. But the main factor for efficiency will be to draw large amounts of text with a single draw call, not one draw call per character.

Also: if the text isn’t continually changing, you may be better off rendering large blocks of text into a texture, then rendering each block as a single quad (triangle pair). Aside from efficiency, this makes it much simpler to work with complex scripts, as you can just delegate the text rendering to e.g. Pango.

[QUOTE=GClements;1292302]One large texture will be more efficient. But the main factor for efficiency will be to draw large amounts of text with a single draw call, not one draw call per character.

Also: if the text isn’t continually changing, you may be better off rendering large blocks of text into a texture, then rendering each block as a single quad (triangle pair). Aside from efficiency, this makes it much simpler to work with complex scripts, as you can just delegate the text rendering to e.g. Pango.[/QUOTE]

Thank you very much! I already render each text object to a seperate texture, so that it only has to be rendered if it has changed.