background-content: Mipmap background texture rendering
gnome-shell displays workspace previews at one tenth scale. That's a few binary orders of magnitude so even using a LINEAR filter was resulting in visible jaggies. Now we apply mipmapping so they appear smooth.
As an added bonus, the mipmaps used occupy roughly 1% the memory of the original image (0.1 x 0.1 = 0.01) so they actually fit into GPU/CPU caches now and rendering performance is improved. There's no need to traverse the original texture which at 4K resolution occupies 33MB, only a 331KB mipmap.
In my case this reduces the render time for the overview by ~10%.
Closes: gnome-shell#1416 (closed)
Edited by Robert Mader