What's new in 1.9000?

This new version of Fractal eXtreme adds some new features, adds an exciting new optimization, and fixes a few miscellaneous bugs.

• New feature: When using the colour mapping speed feature to spread out the palette entries you can now interpolate colours to give smoother gradients and to allow creating images with thousands of colours. This option only works when antialiasing is enabled.

• Optimization: Fractal eXtreme will now automatically detect if you have an SSE2 capable CPU (such as a Pentium 4) and will use SSE2 instructions for better performance. The speedup varies, but on the Newton plugins the speedup was approximately 130%!!

• Optimization reminder: If you have a Hyper-threading capable processor (two hardware threads on one processor) or multiple processors Fractal eXtreme will automatically make use of it the extra computing power. Fractal eXtreme can run an arbitrary number of computation threads to fully utilize your computer's abilities. This is not a new feature, but it is newly relevant now that more people are running multi-processor capable operating systems such as Windows XP.

• Bug fix: There was a bug in the zoom movie player that would sometimes cause a crash when creating an AVI from a zoom movie

• Bug fix: An error in the BMP saving code caused antialiased images (24-bit images) to not be loaded by some graphics programs.

• Bug fix: Fixed an overflow bug in the grid display code

• Bug fix: Fixed a display bug for coordinates between 1000.0 and 1001.0

• Bug fix: Fixed an incorrect shortcut in the undo menu - the wrong keyboard shortcut was listed.