On 04/27/2009 12:53 PM, Jasper van de Gronde wrote:
Blur is to some degree inherently slow, and Inkscape's implementation is already pretty fast, but obviously it's always possible to make things even faster. For example, one thing for which Inkscape has some preliminary support is multi-threading. On a machine with multiple cores Inkscape can take advantage of this to divide the work of blurring over multiple cores.
If you feel that blur is too slow for your work, be sure to file a feature request. And preferably include some (simple) example of a situation that is too slow for you.
In my experience blur is *painfully* slow and always was (now I am running a SVN snapshot) tot he degree that for complex files you may have to use the Outline mode and to export to PNG with GIMP. I spread the various part of an image to various layers and toggle layer visibility on and off, to have as little as possible blur visible at a time, to carry my work.
As for opacity, this is more surprising. Theoretically it shouldn't be much slower than no opacity (in both cases the different layers are blended using more or less the same code). If you can provide any example file(s)+action(s) that show a clear difference in speed of the interface, please file a bug report as soon as possible.
I don't have complains about opacity, probably he is using opacity in combination with blur.