What's the performance impact of using bicubic interpolation in IE?

Question

Everybody knows that IE7 sucks at scaling images. I just recently discovered the trick of using img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } to force IE to use bicubic sampling when scaling images so that they look better. However, I was wondering if anyone knows the performance impact of using ms-interpolation-mode.

Answer 1

It will be slower than nearest-neighbor, but give you a better image. You should just time it and see if it matters.

Answer 2

I've used it before, and as long as you are not doing something to the image (fading it, etc.), anything that might use javascript in a loop that is processing the image, you should be fine. Some experiments I had done in processing the image (through a loop) found some significant performance issues.

Also, if you are doing 'a lot' of images on the page, that could be slow as well.