What's faster? Checking global variables or text on a shape?

I have a prototype with a couple very large drilldown tables constructed with repeaters. Some rows in these tables are affected by a dropdown that controls the unit of measure the data is displayed in.

My interaction setup:

  • on selection change in UOM control: update a couple variables (1 for the value, 1 for the UOM label), then Remove all filters on all repeaters that it affects effectively refreshing them.
  • On Item Load in each repeater: set Text to either [[UOMval]] or [[UOMtext]] depending on whether it’s a header or a data cell.

But OMG is it ever so slow to update, and it makes sense - it’s updating like 500 cells. Would it be more performant to set the text of a shape instead of the global variables? Is there a method I’m not considering? Does it not really matter because it’ll be slow no matter what?