th-otto
commented
4 years ago Font caching (if any) is done by freetype. I think it can be tweaked by applications, but i don't know how to achieve that from a VDI interface (that is usually done by calling some property setting functions on the faces, and/or drivers).
You can also try different freetype versions. The ones i listed on the ML (2.2.1, 2.5.2, 2.8.1 and 2.10.2) should work at least.
But generally, it will be hard to achieve any performance that comes close to NVDI, or even SpeedoGDOS. I do my current tests with a version without freetype support at all, because loading the fonts alone takes ~1min on a 32Mhz/TT emulation.
mfro0
... is - ehm - dissatisfactory.
Even on the Firebee, it takes about 5 seconds to redraw a 640x480 sized window with about 40 different TrueType fonts. On hatari (32 MHz 040 TT emulation) the same window redraw takes > 25 seconds. No improvement after initial display (i.e. this is for every redraw).
Font cache settings don't seem to make any difference (other than crashes due to lack of memory elsewhere when too large). Is the font caching doing anything other than using up memory? Don't think so.
For comparision: NVDI (5.02) on hatari renders the same screen near instantly (80 ms) once initial font caching has been completed. Not that I think that fVDI needs to be as fast as NVDI, but a little closer than several hundred times slower would be nice ;)