Use SVG icons instead of PNG

[Milan]

Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> On Feb 9, 2008 1:27 PM, Milan <nalimilan at club.fr
> <mailto:nalimilan at club.fr>> wrote:
>
>     To sum up, yes, having SVG icons for every app would be good, and
>     no, it
>     does not hurt performance.
>
>
> Depends on your system.  The calculations for SVG technically take
> more cycles to do than just drawing a raster does.  I'm guessing the
> 10 year old computer at my dad's house would be slower with SVG than
> with rasters, but P4 and newer wouldn't have any noticeable difference
> at all.  Maybe having a powerful GPU makes the point moot, but vectors
> do require more calculations than rasters do.
This assessment was referring to my previous comment:

> As for the performance side, several PNG icons are generated, one for
> each common size so the system doesn't need to use the SVG version. SVG
> is only used when really needed (i.e. for sizes superior to 22x22 or 48x48).
Which implied that installing more SVG files wouldn't hurt performance since they won't be used unless you don't have a suitable PNG version at that size. Resizing a PNG that will be blurry or drawing a smart SVG is likely to be quite the same in terms of calculation.


Apart from that, it is obvious that we don't want to make every icon displayed on the desktop come from a SVG, that would be waste of GPU. our current mechanism is quite good, indeed: installing every needed size in PNG, and a SVG version for special cases will solve all problems.


Cheers