[launcher] Pulsing animation while launching applications uses a lot of CPU and slows down application startup

The following sample program reproduces the performance issue caused by the launching animation. To launch it:

$ qmlviewer -graphicssystem raster test.qml

CPU usage on the EFIKA board is around 20% while the animation is on which is the same as what the launcher uses when an application is started.

On my macbook pro 7,1 on Natty (= QT 4.7.2), nVidia 320GM, top shows the following CPU usage:

qmlviewer: 9%

From #760207, Olivier said:

"The cause of the slowdown and high CPU usage seems to be the lack of hardware support: computing the opacity requires non-trivial floating-point operations, doing it in software can easily hog the CPU.

We need to devise a less CPU-intensive alternative animation for low-end hardware."

Confirmed for Unity 3D too (from bug 819118).

Coming over from bug 759813, where both myself and another user are still affected on 12.04.

Chaimcellor, It's my pleasure to help making Ubuntu better. No need to say sorry ;)

Just a small question: Does this bug concerns unity 2d only? Saying this because the previous bug that was marked as dublicate of this, concerned unity 3d.

This is covering Unity 3D as well.

I think that this bug gives a pretty bad impression to the user, so in my opinion this bug should be marked as of high importance at all of the affected packages, given that the bug affects unity3d as well.
Other opinions guys?

I also want to report that the effect is not broken all the times. Strangely, sometimes its ok, sometimes its not. In addition, I notice that minimize effect is not always smooth (mostly in big sized windows) and I suppose this situation has to do with the bug. For example, if you snap a Chromium window to the right so it covers a relatively big part of the desktop, minimize it and restore it again, you 'll sometimes notice this behaviour.