On Tue, 2007-08-21 at 02:16 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
I dunno about the visual effect of this, but it slows down rendering a bit. Not too much but noticeable - a file with 1600 radial gradients renders in 38.8 seconds with this and 37.4 without. So I'd like a switch to control this to be added in prefs.
Another disadvantage is that the rendered PNGs don't compress as well (though realistically any approach which reduced the banding would have that problem to some extent).
I'll see what I can do for the pref (it'd also be helpful for before/after comparisons to assess the effect it's having); it'll require some refactoring so that the test for the prefs value doesn't have to happen in an inner loop, though, since a conditional branch in an inner loop would be likely to hurt performance more.
It's also possible we could gain back some of the lost speed through refactoring -- right now all of the gradient routines except one test for the spread type in the innermost loop, where it's least efficient to do so. Lifting that test out of the loops may also help things.
-mental