Yes, text shaping and layout are complex. My point is that the program wasn't doing anything that should have required a GPU, particularly for the resolutions that were common back then.
replyThe promise was that WPF would use hardware-accelerated libraries such as DirectWrite to put text on the screen even faster than GDI+ (using the CPU) could do. The reality turned out to be quite different: multiple layers of abstraction and just plain inefficient WPF code [1] meant that users needed powerful CPUs and GPUs just to get reasonable performance.
reply[1] https://faithlife.codes/blog/2019/06/improving-wpf-text-disp...
I’m knee deep in refactoring LibreOffice code around text rendering. I can assure you, it’s complex but it doesn’t require a GPU!
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