[cairo] Pixman glyph performance, and beyond!

[Mike Shaver]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:
> If there are unavoidable quality/performance tradeoffs, then as a consumer
> of cairo (Firefox) I would really like to be able to choose our tradeoff
> point, because most of the time for us performance is more important than
> quality. Or better said, slow animation or rendering is a much more obvious
> quality problem than slightly degraded antialiasing.

And, indeed, during animations and so forth the quality difference may
not be perceptible, so we might well want to slip into "not quite as
awesome" mode during transitions and animations and scrolling or
whatever, and then do the last frame in "great!" mode.  If we are
doing a bounded animation and can use the GPU, we could even prepare
that visually stunning end frame while the animation was being
processed...

Mike