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On both OSX and PC, when reading PDF slides or e-book today I still experienced the lagging problem when quickly scrolling through pages. Both in-browser or in application like OSX's Preview, Windows' Reader, experienced the same thing.
Because I imagined the task of just displaying something is not a big deal and should be fast by now. How come my 3D games runs a lot smoother and update quicker than a PDF file?
5argon
Posted 2015-07-13T04:59:06.167
Reputation: 149
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The PDF specification itself is rather complex. But as you observe, one would expect GHz of processing power to blaze through it.
Anyway, the answer is (at a high level) straight-forward. PDF rendering could be made to be fast and efficient. But doing so would involve a tremendous outlay of coding effort. Writing optimized code is difficult and time-consuming.
In respect of office/productivity software, including PDF viewers, developers tend to focus on pushing through new features and functionality in favor of "wasting" their valuable resources optimizing for performance. After all, what good is highly performing software if it doesn't deliver all the whiz-bang features we demand. And the commercial reality these days is that major version bumps have to occur frequently if developers want to stay in business.
GAMES are a whole different kettle of fish. A positive end-user experience absolutely requires a high level of performance. A game that is otherwise great will be a flop if it only achieves 10 fps. So game developers pour enormous amounts of resources into optimizing for performance. Over the years, game houses have developed and refined entire frameworks and libraries that contain super-optimized code their developers can re-use and leverage off.
Here's some interesting reading about optimization in general.
misha256
Posted 2015-07-13T04:59:06.167
Reputation: 10 292
Maybe your PDFs use a lot of big and very compressed images, and since PDF files and viewers are not optimized for heavy rendering workloads you experience that lag. It doesn't matter how fast and powerful a computer is, if the code is not correctly optimized to use the hardware correctly, things just won't work right. – arielnmz – 2015-07-13T05:14:10.037
For what it's worth, I noticed a considerable faster loading time using sumatra pdf instead of acrobat XI. – jiggunjer – 2015-12-05T07:55:14.157