GM 1.3 not long now

GraphicsMagick 1.3 is pretty close to release.  Most algorithms are 
updated for (often entirely re-written) to be parallelized using 
OpenMP (over 85 algorithms updated!).  After years of slaving away to 
achieve incremental performance boosts of 10, 20, or 30% at a time, it 
is really exciting to see performance step up almost linearly on 
multi-core systems as cores are added.

A really common operation for me is scale an image by 50% and sharpen 
it as well:

   gm convert amsterdam.dpx -resize 50% -sharpen 0x0.5 crap.dpx

On my four core system this takes 0.598 seconds with one core, but 
0.204 with all four cores (2.931 times speedup).  Something 
unfortunate is that if JPEG format is used, then timing is 1.043 with 
one core and 0.679 with four cores (only 1.536 times speedup).  It 
quickly becomes clear that it is necessary to use uncompressed formats 
like DPX, MIFF, TIFF, or PNM in order to gain full advantage of the 
speedup.  Legacy libraries like libjpeg and libpng are single threaded 
and it takes longer to decode the image than it takes to process it. 
Any single-threaded parts of the path outside of GraphicsMagick can 
not be speeded up.

Note that the original amsterdam.jpg image may be retrieved from an 
old benchmark report at http://www.baschny.de/graphic-test/.  It is 
interesting to see how far things have come in the mean time since a 
test with GraphicsMagick 1.0.5 took 4.86 seconds at that time on the 
reviewer's computer, but it takes 0.149 seconds (with GM 1.3) for me 
now.

Since I am also posting to the APIs list, I will mention that Magick++ 
has some new Image methods, and that the Color class no longer 
considers transparent black to be an "invalid" color

Since GM 1.3 is now on the fast-track for release, please be sure to 
download a snapshot and make sure that it works well for you so that 
this can be the best release ever.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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