Cairo 1.12.4 Brings Worthwhile Changes

Taking a break from his crazy activity on the Intel driver and SNA acceleration architecture, Chris Wilson released today Cairo 1.12.4. There are some worthwhile changes and new features to this release making it worth the upgrade.

Key work in Cairo 1.12.4 comes down to:

- Cairo-GL has refinements to its MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing) compositor to enable hardware acceleration of comparatively low-quality anti-aliasing, which benefits animations and very high density displays.

- Cair-Xlib finally has enabled SHM transport for image transfers to/from the X.Org Server. The shared memory transport offers a reduction in rendering latency by reducing the number of copies on uploaded image data. Cairo-xlib can now achieve zero-copy uploads to the GPU.

- Cairo-PDF saw various improvements.

- Cairo-Image now has support for rendering glyphs to Pixman and using that result within Cairo. This change reduces overhead for the setting up the compositing operation.

More information on the new Cairo 1.12.4 release is available from CairoGraphics.org.