Re: Antialiased fonts patch.

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz>]

On 26 January 2010 11:04, Evgeny Kolesnikov <evgenyz@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> At first I was completely against antialiasing support because of
>> performance impact. But it being optional decreases the later. However
>> there is one problem: your patch relies on text_layer to be RGBA8888
>> which was a mistake. RGBA8888 for text layer is vastly inefficient
>> especially on 16-bit framebuffer and CPUs with small cache. I had plans
>> to switch it to indexed color. Do you really need 8bits and 4 aren't
>> enough?
>
> I use 8-bit in order to give GRUB ability to look and feel exactly
> as other parts of OS, so yes, 8 bits are required. If one can't allow

Grub will never look and feel exactly as the OS unless you import
GTK/QT, its themes, freetype, ...

> this for his system - he can use 1-bit fonts. I don't really care about
> such situation just because other parts of desktop on such a system will
> be awful too.

In fact I think that 4bit antialiasing should suffice. 16 tones of the
same color should be more than enough for most cases. Still I am not
sure that it will make the rendering really faster than 8bit AA.

Only testing on various  real hardware can possibly answer the
question if and when one of the methods is faster. I would even expect
that none is overall faster and that system exist where either is.

Thanks

Michal