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Comment on "Core Animation Isn't Just for Animation"
by ssp — Oct 05
I'd be interested in what specific things you've seen.

As I said, CA stuff seemed sluggish compared to direct NSView drawing.
I'd link to a blog post I wrote on the topic, but it seems I forgot to publish it… will do that in the coming days.

From a computation perspective, Core Animation has vast ocean of raw power at its disposal in the graphics card. The most obvious example of this is the "iTunes album art city" screensaver that bounced around WWDC and the Leopard promotion site.

I haven't seen that 'live' myself, but I'd say it's exactly a usage case which is not interactive and where latency or snappiness doesn't play a role.

So on paper at least, there really should be no contest in terms of raw performance between equivalent NSViews and CALayers. That said, some of the special effects (filters, for example) are very expensive — I assume because they don't all happen on the graphics card. So if you're using bloom filters and such, then things can get sluggish.

That's why I asked about numbers or concrete experiences. It's unsurprising that _on paper_ Apple make their technologies sound great. And I am not even speaking about filters or computationally expensive stuff here. All I tried to do was to use CA for superimposing a handful of elements I needed drawn in my view – no filters used at all.
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