Joshua Facemyer / Impressus Art wrote:
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I assume that when I make changes to my drawing in Inkscape (for example, the nodes on a spline curve), the calculations are done on CPU (as is evidenced by my CPU usage stats). So, my first question is what is the connection between 2-D calculations and hardware?
Most drawing programs purely rely on your CPU (as far as I am aware, although there are some people doing hardware accelerated 2D rendering). I'm not entirely sure why they don't use the GPU (more at least), probably because it's usually not that necessary and graphics hardware is usually geared towards 3D.
A similar question is this: is there any advantage to having certain graphics hardware over others (assuming we're talking about modern video cards) for using 2-d graphics apps? In other words, does having more memory, higher bandwidth, faster clock speed, etc make any difference whatever in the time it takes to remove a node from a spline or blur a shape?
As far as I know it shouldn't really matter.
I'm assuming the answer to the last question is either "no" or "complex no". If I am correct, my next question would be: What is the single most important part of hardware to consider for speeding up Inkscape performance.
Probably your CPU and main memory, possibly your chipset (motherboard), to get a higher memory bandwidth.