Chapter 13: ECMAScript and SVG Animation | Fundamentals of SVG Programming: Concepts to Source Code (Graphics Series)

SVG Performance

As you probably already know, the rendering of SVG-based graphics images can be very CPU-intensive, particularly when the SVG document contains a significant amount of dynamically generated SVG. Roughly 20% of the SVG code in this book was developed and tested on a 166MHz PC, and the remainder (which includes virtually all of the examples with ECMAScript code) was developed and tested on a 2GHz Pentium 4. Generally, the most CPU-intensive SVG code in this book involves code that contains many dynamically generated SVG elements such as Bezier curves, elliptic arcs, and filters that are often accompanied by many dynamically generated color gradients. Other examples of CPU-intensive code involve the SVG skew element combined with many dynamically generated SVG elements. As you peruse the examples on the CD-ROM and launch them in a browser session, you will be able to determine which examples are suitable for your hardware configuration. Another point to keep in mind is that some software applications require a relatively low color resolution in order to function properly, in which case the SVG code will not appear as sharp and rich. For best viewing results, make sure that you maximize the number of colors displayed while rendering the SVG code.