> I may be confused. But you have looked at the demo, right?

I have run the demo multiple times, how else would I have generated the time it took for me to run it in the comment above :).

> Hm, I was comparing the same number of digits displayed on screen though. One takes 2s to compute and display 10k digits of information on screen, one takes 30s to compute and display 10k digits of information on screen. same number of digits. At least according to the "progress" output that reads "Digits done".

"Digits done" is the number of correct digits, not the number of displayed digits. It's possible your screen area is too small to notice the difference.

Here is an in progress shot of 10k at 2088 "Digits done" https://i.imgur.com/Fbuw2sc.png

Here is an in progress shot of 100k at 1849 "Digits done" https://i.imgur.com/O1gTogQ.png

As you can see "Digits done" ~= "Digits displayed" in this demo by any means. It simply represents the number of digits that will no longer change as the calculation continues, it is still displaying all the digits every update regardless if they are "done" or not which is where the inefficiencies in rendering come in (and based on the above benchmarks outweigh any other inefficiencies with number size substantially).