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Can someone explain to me why I should want my terminal to be hardware-accelerated? I use my terminal to get stuff done by running commands and viewing the output. Sometimes I might run a TUI but I've certainly never found one that required a GPU to run. If I want to run a full-blown GUI I run it from my WM / DE. Am I missing something here?

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> why I should want my terminal to be hardware-accelerated

So your CPU can focus on doing useful computation instead of software-rendering the terminal.

Does the CPU really spend a lot of time rendering text output if I don't use a GPU to do it? My guess is that it would take away a vanishingly small fraction of the time available for useful computation - but maybe I'm wrong?

In short - it depends on your CPU and your display configuration.

On a 640x480 screen, a terminal will probably render fine with low CPU overhead. On a HiDPI screen, CPU may have millions of pixels to render for a single terminal window.

It's not that different from other application programs IMO. DAWs and VSTs often offload rendering to GPUs to save as many CPU cycles as possible to get the latency down. I love having low latency in my terminals, so I prefer GPU accelerated emulators.

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