Get the latest tech news

Eight million pixels and counting: improving texture atlas allocation in Firefox (2021)

Posts and writings by Nical

I don't know enough about the many non-latin scripts used around the world to trust that my testing workloads were representative enough, so I decided that I should stick to safe bets (such as "glyphs are usually small") and avoid piling up optimizations that might penalize some languages. For short sessions (visiting only a handful of web pages) it was not as tightly packed as the guillotine allocator, but after browsing for longer period of time, it had a tendency to better deal with fragmentation. Today this translates into fewer draw calls and less CPU-to-GPU transfers which has a noticeable impact on performance on low end Intel GPUs, in addition to reducing GPU memory usage.

Get the Android app