On Mar 15, 2010, at 3:46 AM, Philip Taylor wrote:

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com> wrote:
Copying from one canvas to another is much faster than copying to/ from
ImageData. To make copying to a Worker worthwhile as a responsiveness
improvement for rotations or downscales, in addition to the OffscreenCanvas proposal we would need a faster way to copy image data to a Worker. One
possibility is to allow an OffscreenCanvas to be copied to and from a
background thread. It seems this would be much much faster than copying via
ImageData.

Maybe this indicates that implementations of getImageData/putImageData
ought to be optimised? e.g. do the expensive multiplications and
divisions in the premultiplication code with SIMD. (A seemingly
similar thing at http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1939
suggests SSE2 makes things 3x as fast). That would avoid the need to
invent new API, and would also benefit anyone who wants to use
ImageData for other purposes.

It might be possible to make getImageData/putImageData faster than they are currently, certainly the browsers at the slower end of the ImageData performance spectrum must have a lot of headroom. But they probably also probably have room to optimize drawImage. (Looking back at my data I noticed that getImageData + putImageData in Safari is about as fast or faster than two drawImage calls in the other browsers tested).

In the end, though, I doubt that it's possible for getImageData or putImageData to be as fast as drawImage, since drawImage doesn't have to do any conversion of the pixel format.

Regards,
Maciej

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