What are the most efficient ways for rendering bitmap fonts using a vertex buffer object?
These are the ways that I know at the moment (I don't know about the efficiency):
- Creating a massive VBO and storing data of textured quads (one texture for all characters and one quad for a letter in text).
- Also creating a VBO for all text that needs to be rendered, but with bigger quads and textures. Texture size would be equal to the GPU limit or smaller if it would be possible to fit the text in a smaller texture without reducing the quality.
- Creating a one not that big VBO with textured quad data of all characters. And rendering by multiple draw calls (per letter).
I think you should split the answer for dynamic and static rendering.