I don't really have any complaints or accolades for the internals of SVG, but I was recently evaluating image format for use with a tile-based browser game and

I don't really have any complaints or accolades for the internals of SVG, but I was recently evaluating image format for use with a tile-based browser game and stumbled upon a performance issue. After some quick experiments, I found that SVG is a total non starter compared to PNG and JPEG. At image counts in the tens, you can't tell the difference. If you are rendering a 20x30 grid of 600 images, SVG can take seconds, whereas the raster formats can redraw at monitor refresh rate. My process now is to treat the SVGs as art source code and to raster them into various formats as required at design time. I am a little bit disappointed by this outcome, as I was hoping for "infinite resolution" game art that would accommodate the varying zoom levels automagically. I will now be working with pre rastered tile sets for discrete zoom thresholds. I was expecting SVG to be slower, but not that much slower.