Fast rasterizing of text and vector art

Question

Suppose there is a lot of vector shapes (Bezier curves which determine the boundary of a shape). For example a page full of tiny letters.

What is the fastest way to create a bitmap out of it?

I once saw a demo several years ago (can't find it now) where some guys used GPU to rasterize the vector art - they were able to zoom in/out of the page in real-time. What is the current state of GPU rendering of Bezier shapes? Is it really fast? Faster than CPU? What are the common and not-so-common algorithms? Is there any open source library for such things? What language does it use? What about OpenGL?

Answer 1

NVIDIA has now an extension for OpenGL that can do this stuff. I guess it's based on the Microsoft RAVG paper.

http://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering