[pygame] Rotation Performance

[Bram Cymet <bcymet@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I did some profiling of my pygame application and I found that it was
spending a lot of time doing rotation operations. Basically I have some
balls on the screen that are represented by gifs with transparent
backgrounds and I want to make them spin.

I use the following code:


These first two lines are only run in init for the object
     self.image = pygame.image.load('image.gif')
     self.image = self.image.convert()

  self.image = pygame.transform.rotate(self.image, degrees)
  self.rect = self.image.get_rect()

Then I return the rect and blit and update that part of the screen. A
lot of time is spent on that pygame.transform.rotate command. On my
laptop with a dual core 2.2 ghz processor if works fine. However on the
target hardware which is:

Atom 330 (dual core 1.6 ghz) with an ION chipset and graphics

it runs very slow and can take up to 0.2 seconds to execute just that
one line of code.

Is there something I am doing wrong? Is there some way I can make this
faster.

I am not sure if it matters but just for the sake of completeness: the
application is multi-threaded but only one thread is running during this
part of the application.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,  

-- 
Bram Cymet
Software Developer
Canadian Bank Note Co. Ltd.
Cell: 613-608-9752