kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <lomarcan@xxxxxx>]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 04:11:57PM +0000, Mário Luzeiro wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I had a feeling yesterday, on the openGL mode that looks different: low-res blurred interpolated font.
> I may was a bit blurred myself, but I found other users complaining about the same:
> 
> https://forum.kicad.info/t/switch-of-blurring-of-pad-text-in-new-opengl-engine/3837
> 
> Any one noticed? Any changes that can causing this?

Probably it's the new bitmapped font... consumer GPUs are optimized for
munching textures, not vectors, so on very busy board the vectorial font
was too slow to handle. Now is done with quads (4 vertices) AFAIK, one
for each character. In comparison the vector text need to send to the
GPU something like 6 vertices for each line segment in the font, more or
less an order of magnitude of difference!

The cons is that now since the font is bitmapped the resolution is
finite and what you call blur is the bilinear filtering of the character
images...

This should explain the reason, for the details maybe the developers
that did it have more informations.

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio

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