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Vim 8.0 Released! (google.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader MrKaos writes: The venerable and essential vim has had it's first major release in 10 years. Lots of new and interesting features including, vim script improvements, JSON support, messages exchange with background processes, a test framework and a bunch of Windows DirectX compatibility improvements. A package manager has been added to handle the ever-growing plug-in library, start-up changes and support for a lot of old platforms has been dropped. Many Vimprovements!
In text mode, no, there's no rendering going on. But in graphical mode, you have to translate the characters to pixels, and that's not a trivial task anymore. Add in scrolling and other tasks you do with blocks of text, and you're pushing serious pixels. Especially if you operate in a high resolution mode (4K monitors aren't hard to find these days).
DirectWrite is a GPU-optimized font renderer for Windows - it loads the fonts into the GPU memory, and then the font rendering programs, plus text effects like ClearType. You then send it the characters and the GPU renders it down, like it did in text mode, but without the blocky pixellated look. Given how many pixels it has to push these days, it's a task a GPU is much better suited for, and it makes scrolling and displaying large windows text all that much faster and with lowered CPU load.
GDI allows a lot of nifty tricks, but 99% of the time, no one uses all those tricks - they just want to spit text onto the screen. So Microsoft created a GPU optimized way to accelerate the common task.