Hi, jaycox@xxxxxxxx (2005-03-01 at 2059.06 -0800): > It ought to be easy enough to detect when antialiasing will be needed > and automagically turn it on. > > I havnt looked at the supersampling code yet, but I think it might be > much faster to do the supersampling in a second pass since such a small > percentage of pixels actually need it. That is what adaptive means, it computes extra samples in the pixels that change too much. But instead of checking at the end, it checks at the same time it calculates the gradient, and does not compute more samples than needed. IIRC, exactly what POVRay does. If you make it auto, it is going to go always slower due the forced extra checks, instead of letting the user decide if the result is poor or not for what he wants: checking a gradient that is ultra smooth is a waste, a poor result that is later processed with noise or blur is not so "poor".... IOW, supersampling is nice for the small set of cases in which it really matters, otherwise it is going to be slower always. Of course, it is going to be faster in many cases than full sampling and scaling down. If anybody figures a better method than user selectable adaptive (best case as fast as no oversampling, worst case as slow as adaptive), I guess POVRay Team will like to hear too. :] Or maybe GIMP could also do the background trickery as reported in other mails, do not compute composition stack when it is not needed (areas out of image window, zoom not 1:1, fully opaque normal pixels...) and many other things to make it feel fast. GSR
