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> Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text

Displaying text is surprisingly hard, as one can easily find out if ones dives into the big rabbit hole of font rendering.

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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.

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!

The 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.

[1] https://faithlife.codes/blog/2019/06/improving-wpf-text-disp...

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