Bas Schouten

So, this is where I give my first blog post a shot. Let's see how it goes. So, I've been working for Mozilla on implementing DirectWrite as a Cairo and gfxFont backend, in order to investigate the differences, see bug 51642. DirectWrite is a new font rendering API that was released with Windows 7, and will be included in the Vista platform update for Windows Vista SP2. It offers a number of advantages over the old GDI font rendering system, which I will attempt to elaborate on. The main advantages that it has over GDI are:

• Sub-pixel shaping and rendering
• Bi-directional anti-aliasing. (GDI only supported horizontal anti-aliasing)

JDagget already has a nice post on CFF font rendering here. I'm hoping to give some additional information here.

First of all let's look at the W as found on the front page of the Mozilla Minefield start page:

GDI	DirectWrite

First of all it can be seen that the subpixel anti-aliasing is 'softer' in the DirectWrite version. Where in GDI the cleartype anti-aliasing introduces a fairly strong colorization (the left edge is clearly yellowish, the right side is clearly purple-ish), the DirectWrite version introduces a more natural color transition with the sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
Another difference that can be seen are the serifs at the top of the W, there the advantage of vertical anti-aliasing can clearly be seen, where in the GDI version the serif is really mostly a block of 2 pixels high, the vertical anti-aliasing in the DirectWrite version introduces the actual curve expected in a serif.

Another big advantage of using DirectWrite can clearly be seen when we look at transformed texts. The following are different transformation situations, comparing the results between DirectWrite and GDI:

GDI	DirectWrite

In the first example it can clearly be seen that GDI has clear aliasing and placement issues when rendering transformed fonts which DirectWrite doesn't suffer from. A displacement in the line of the 'B' from button can clearly be seen. Also the lack of vertical anti-aliasing is clearly visible in the transformed setting where the main lines of the font are diagonally placed.

The second image again illustrates the improved subpixel anti-aliasing performance in DirectWrite. The DirectWrite case looks quite good, whereas in the GDI case the text is barely legible. The anti-aliasing issues GDI has here are clearly visible in the i in 'becoming' where it actually shows as a red letter because of inaccurate sub-pixel usage. Additionally several lines and curves of the letters are simply not visible in the GDI case.

The last image in this series shows another interesting property. The most notable effect in this image is the pixel snapping occuring on the letters by GDI. It can clearly be seen that the letters are snapped to whole pixels on the circle. Where in the case of untransformed text the baseline is completely aligned on pixels, this is not a big issue. In the case of the circular baseline, this means the 'O' of the second case of 'round' actually floats above the line, and the 'e' in the first 'We' is actually floating above the baseline. In the DirectWrite version the benefit of the subpixel positioning can clearly be seen as the text is nicely aligned along the circle.

The advantages of subpixel positioning are not limited to transformed text though, below is an example of how subpixel positioning can improve the kerning of text.

GDI	DirectWrite

In the GDI example it is clear that the spacing between the E and the V is rather odd. You can see this effect if you go to the Mozilla website and slowly, pixel by pixel, decrease the horizontal size of the window. You can see the letters 'dance around' with respect to eachother as each individual glyph's origin gets snapped to a vertical pixel row. When using DirectWrite, subpixel placement means the glyphs are spaced identically at all window sizes.

The final screenshots I'd like to show are a general look at the browser UI:

Now this is where DirectWrite arguably does not perform better. The DirectWrite UI clearly looks 'lighter' than the GDI UI. And although the curves and letters are smoother. At the font size and DPI in the situation of the screenshots it is likely very personal as to which one you feel is better. One advantage that DirectWrite does have is the superior subpixel anti-aliasing again. In the GDI example there's clear colorization at the horizontal boundaries of the lines. DirectWrite does not suffer from this, a final image illustrates this:

I hope I've given everybody reading this a bit of an idea of the quality differences between GDI and DirectWrite. The last point I'd like to mention briefly is performance. The current implementation primarily uses draws to a Direct2D surface created using CreateDCRenderTarget, this means that for every font operation, Direct2D will rebind the DC render target to a GDI surface. For a DCRenderTarget Direct2D internally does as much hardware acceleration as possible, and then blits that surface to the software GDI surface when done. As a fallback it can draw to a DirectWrite GDI interop surface. But this codepath should usually not be used.

When using the Direct2D method performance at the moment is slightly worse than in GDI. Interestingly enough CPU usage does not saturate when actively continuously re-rendering fonts, this is most likely due to the font rendering blocking waiting for hardware rendering operations to finish. Making the rendering thread regularly relinguish some of its time slice as it starts waiting for the display hardware. Part of the decrease in performance can probably be attributed to the fact DirectWrite simply does more work that GDI does. Should certain features be disabled it will probably perform better. Additionally a more clever way should be devised to manage the D2D surfaces, in theory each gfxWindowsSurface could have a D2D DCRenderTarget, and keep hold of that, preventing the surface binding currently needed on every single font drawing operation.

Well, that's about it for this post. I hope my first attempt at this sort of post is an interesting read for everyone! I hope to be able to share more information in the near future. Oh, and before I forget! There's a try-server build that will use DirectWrite on Windows 7, feel free to try it on your favourite font stress-test!