Why is text2d and text3d so slow?

Question

Recently i started timing operations in a game I am writting to find out where the bottlenecks were. Most of the delays I found made sense but I was suprised to find that writting text (2d or 3d) to the screen took an unacceptably large amout of time, even compared to drawing dxf models that were a few MB large each...
The solution I thought of was to save letters and numbers as images and just arrange them on the screen as I needed to, but this seems like a clumsy way to get around the problem. Can anyone tell me why this is or how to overcome it?
Jonathan O'Brien

Answer 1

Text rendering is a very complex process. You're thinking it should be fast because you're assuming the use of bitmap fonts. Instead, most fonts of a type called "TrueType" which is a set of vector instructions that explain how the font should be drawn. By following these instructions, the font renderer is able to smoothly render the text as large or as a small as it wants, and even use antialiasing to make the corners as smooth as possible. All of this work for nice looking fonts comes at a price however. That's why games usually create their own bitmap fonts ahead of time. As a bonus, games can use "cool" looking fonts that look futuristic, prehistoric, or created by animals.