On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 14:16, Bryce Harrington wrote:
I don't think anyone's quantified it, but I traced through the code that gets called to render them, and it's quite extensive. My guess is that it's quite a bit slower, but couldn't say how much. I suspect that could be mitigated via caching the rendered bitmaps at compile or installation time.
The SVG icons are generally only rendered once into GdkPixbufs and then painted from those, so it's not like we take a hit for every expose event.
I honestly don't think it's worthwhile trying to optimize the SVG icon display too agressively, since it's mostly limited to our startup time, and really doesn't appear to cost _too_ much there.
What we probably should be doing is setting up a GtkIconFactory which does the rendering, and is in a position to better cache the rendered icons in a centralized place, and do things more on-demand.
SPIcon doesn't really have any advantages over GtkImage, anyway, now that I've rewritten it to use standard gdk calls for painting (which means the compositing can be hardware accelerated on servers with XRender, and it shouldn't look hideous on pixmap themes anymore).
-mental