1152x900 8bit = 1,036,800 bytes on screen<p>1920x1080 24bit = 6,220,800 bytes on screen<p>So for starters, a lot of people are trying to push around more, larger, pixels.<p>Some years ago I did some experiments with the OLPC-XO essentially analysing this exact problem.  Modern software on a platform weaker then current Entry-Level.<p>Analysing the overhead in printing a terminal text to a screen, I found a process that output a great deal of text but &gt;dev&#x2F;null took 1.5 seconds and tried a couple of different terminals.<p><pre><code>    7 seconds using bitmapped fonts 
    30 seconds using xft
    6 minutes 34 seconds using vte (Pango&#x2F;Cairo)
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s a lot of overhead.  You get unicode, scalable fonts and extras but it all comes with a cost.   Most of that cost isn&#x27;t intrinsic to the additional capabilities, but just an accumulation of minor inefficiencies because the result was ok on the machines we were using at the time.