I was playing around with drawing paths, and I noticed that in at least some cases, UIBezierPath outperforms what I thought would be a Core Graphics equivalent. The -drawRect:
method below creates two paths: one UIBezierPath, and one CGPath. The paths are identical except for their locations, but stroking the CGPath takes roughly twice as long as stroking the UIBezierPath.
- (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect
{
CGContextRef ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
// Create the two paths, cgpath and uipath.
CGMutablePathRef cgpath = CGPathCreateMutable();
CGPathMoveToPoint(cgpath, NULL, 0, 100);
UIBezierPath *uipath = [[UIBezierPath alloc] init];
[uipath moveToPoint:CGPointMake(0, 200)];
// Add 200 curve segments to each path.
int iterations = 200;
CGFloat cgBaseline = 100;
CGFloat uiBaseline = 200;
CGFloat xincrement = self.bounds.size.width / iterations;
for (CGFloat x1 = 0, x2 = xincrement;
x2 < self.bounds.size.width;
x1 = x2, x2 += xincrement)
{
CGPathAddCurveToPoint(cgpath, NULL, x1, cgBaseline-50, x2, cgBaseline+50, x2, cgBaseline);
[uipath addCurveToPoint:CGPointMake(x2, uiBaseline)
controlPoint1:CGPointMake(x1, uiBaseline-50)
controlPoint2:CGPointMake(x2, uiBaseline+50)];
}
[[UIColor blackColor] setStroke];
CGContextAddPath(ctx, cgpath);
// Stroke each path.
[self strokeContext:ctx];
[self strokeUIBezierPath:uipath];
[uipath release];
CGPathRelease(cgpath);
}
- (void)strokeContext:(CGContextRef)context
{
CGContextStrokePath(context);
}
- (void)strokeUIBezierPath:(UIBezierPath*)path
{
[path stroke];
}
Both paths use CGContextStrokePath(), so I created separate methods to stroke each path so that I can see the time used by each path in Instruments. Below are typical results (call tree inverted); you can see that -strokeContext:
takes 9.5 sec., while -strokeUIBezierPath:
takes only 5 sec.:
Running (Self) Symbol Name
14638.0ms 88.2% CGContextStrokePath
9587.0ms 57.8% -[QuartzTestView strokeContext:]
5051.0ms 30.4% -[UIBezierPath stroke]
5051.0ms 30.4% -[QuartzTestView strokeUIBezierPath:]
It looks like UIBezierPath is somehow optimizing the path that it creates, or I'm creating the CGPath in a naïve way. What can I do to speed up my CGPath drawing?