Spinel Performance — Newspapers

- 1 min read

There are five newspaper front pages in this example.

The two German newspapers have particularly dense and small type while the Japanese newspaper’s glyphs are much more complex than the glyphs on the other four pages.

It’s very important to note that these examples were converted directly from a PDF to an SVG and there was no intelligent instancing of glyphs. From the Spinel pipeline’s perspective, every glyph on the page is a unique path.

A proper implementation of a text viewer or editor would be significantly more efficient by leveraging Spinel’s fast paths for instancing.

As you’ll see below, Spinel is already demonstrating incredible efficiency despite the amplification of work and is able to execute the entire pipeline in only 4-7 milliseconds. Redrawing is sub-millisecond for the non-Japanese papers.

All five pages were rendered by Spinel on a GTX 980 at 4K.

With Vsync off, the Japanese paper rotates at over 140 FPS and the rest at over 250 FPS.

With Vsync on, the frame rate is locked at 60 FPS and the non-Japanese pages show very low GPU utilization:

  • GPU load: 14-22%
  • MEM load: 5-10%
  • Power: 34-37% of TDP

The more complex Japanese front page is slightly higher:

  • GPU load: 36-38%
  • MEM load: 8%
  • Power: 38% of TDP

(video removed)