I keep seeing comments about cell-based GPU glyph lookup in the pixel shader being a "new" way to render terminals. It is not new. It is ancient. A "GPU" that looked up one glyph per character cell is literally what the very first IBM PC had in it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 …
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Programming a GPU in the pixel shader to do this lookup is really just emulating what actual terminals used to do! There's nothing new here. We're literally just putting in the "microcode" for literal terminal emulation :)
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Replying to @cmuratori
As somebody who has very little experience with GPU programming, when I was toying around trying to render in opengl, I wrote the glyph lookup on the CPU side, is there a massive benefit to make it happen in the shader, for relatively 'simple' tasks, like rendering a text editor?
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Both techniques are fine. The only reason I used lookup on the GPU side is because terminals are cell-based displays by definition, so you know that the glyph lookup is closely correlated to the GPU warp. So it's an obvious choice in this particular case.
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