CGLayer and Anti-aliased CGPaths

Question

I am drawing several CGPaths in a Cocoa view in the drawRect method on an iPad. I started out drawing them straight to the UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext() context, but performance went south when my paths got really long. Based on several other questions, I started looking into using CGLayers.

So what I do now is to render a path inside of the CGContextRef I get from calling CGLayerGetContext. Here's the basic outline of what I'm doing:

// rect comes from the drawRect: method
layer = CGLayerCreateWithContext(context, rect.size, NULL);
layerContext = CGLayerGetContext(layer);
CGContextSetLineCap(layerContext, kCGLineCapRound);

// Set the line styles
CGContextSetLineJoin(layerContext, kCGLineJoinRound);
CGContextSetLineWidth(layerContext, 1.0);
CGContextSetStrokeColorWithColor(layerContext, [UIColor blackColor].CGColor);

// Create a mutable path
path = CGPathCreateMutable();

// Move to start point
//...

for (int i = 0; i < points.count; i++) {
    // compute controlPoint and anchorPoint
    //...

    CGPathAddQuadCurveToPoint(path,
                              nil,
                              controlPoint.x,
                              controlPoint.y,
                              anchorPoint.x,
                              anchorPoint.y);
}
// Stroke the path
CGContextAddPath(layerContext, path);
CGContextStrokePath(layerContext);

// Add the layer to the main context
CGContextDrawLayerAtPoint(context, CGPointZero, layer);

Now, I get good performance drawing, but my lines are extremely jagged and do not seem to be anti-aliased. I've tried adding

CGContextSetShouldAntialias(layerContext, YES);
CGContextSetAllowsAntialiasing(layerContext, YES);
CGContextSetInterpolationQuality(layerContext, kCGInterpolationHigh);

to the code above to no avail. I've even set the anti-aliasing properties on the main context, with no change. I took screen shots of the same code results, but with the second image being the image created from drawing in the CGLayer. As you can see, it is really jagged, despite being the same code, just drawing into a layerContext. How can I get the lines in the CGLayer to be smooth?

Answer 1

I found the reason the second image is not anti-aliased is because there was nothing to anti-alias against. The background was empty, and so anti-aliasing didn't work. If you make a big rectangle over the bounds of the view that is entirely transparent, the line will draw with anti-aliasing. However, performance is killed. Better not to go this route.