All,

I committed the patch by Jasper van de Gronde which improves the quality of rendering gradients (less banding). But on top of that, the committed version also speeds up rendering quite significantly, making it up to twice as fast in my tests (on complex files with many transparency overlays). Unfortunately for some reason, this speedup is observed only on Windows, whereas on Linux the patch is actually a little slower (by no more than 10%). Any ideas on why this is so will be appreciated, as well as of course any reports of bugs or any misbehavior.