[vtkusers] Anti-aliasing text - Performance

[Philip Schuchardt]

After testing and hacking up the vtkFreeTypeUtilities.cxx, I found out that 
anti-aliased fonts do not cause a significant performance hit.  I do not know 
openGL very well.  After skimming through the VTK source, it seems to me that 
VTK has an extra openGL overhead while rendering each actor.  The rendering 
overhead probably causing the performance hit while trying to render 1000 
textactors.  In the next couple of weeks, I want to pound out a text manager 
that renders text more quickly, without the overhead.  This manager would 
also have text collision detection so string don't write over each other.  
Any suggestions?

Philip Schuchardt

On Wednesday 14 March 2007 4:19 pm, Philip Schuchardt wrote:
> I'm trying to render over 1000 text actors at once and there is a huge
> preformace hit. By default vtk uses anti-aliasing text for vtkTextActor and
> vtkTextMapper.  I think the anti-aliasing is causing the large preformace
> hit with that many actors.   I have a simalar openGL application that has
> good performance without aliased fonts.  It appears that turning off the
> anti aliasing in the vtkTextProperty was removed in version 5.0.  Is there
> anyway any other way to turn off anti-aliasing for text ie. making the text
> aliased?
>
> If there is no way to do this... I will probably end up calling openGL
> directly.
>
> System:
> Gentoo Linux
> AMD64 X2 4400
> Nvidia 7800GTX 256mb
>
> Thanks
> Philip Schuchardt
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