Pixman Has Improved Gradients, Is Much Faster

While Cairo is frequently mentioned on Phoronix, mentioned less but used by Cairo (as well as the X.Org Server) for pixel manipulation is the Pixman library. Soeren Sandmann announced a new release candidate of Pixman 0.19.6 this afternoon and it has a few interesting changes worth noting.

New to Pixman are much improved radial and linear gradients, performance improvements, enhanced performance specific to the SSE2 back-end, and a number of bug-fixes and test suite enhancements. The performance improvements should be rather noticeable, especially on ARM platforms.

Pixman 0.19.6 is a development snapshot leading up to the stable Pixman 0.20.0 release. The release announcement and download links for this version of Pixman can be found on xorg-announce.