Comment 5 for bug 1095702

Just to add my ~2 cents, as I don't know what direction you're going in right now: I honestly don't think the texture caching is a good idea. On lower end systems, video memory may actually be the scarcest resource for us, because we are already using so much memory for textures and animations of both workers and buildings.

But even those lower end systems are typically _very_ good at putting a lot of textured quads onto the screen fast. I expect that combining
1) a cache of font glyphs that tries to keep all glyphs on the same OpenGL texture,
2) a cache of the layout results, and
3) putting those together into vertex arrays for rendering
would give the best results on those systems, at least when using OpenGL. (With a bit of luck, explicit vertex arrays may not even be necessary.)