I didn’t do a proper test, where I would do the interpolation “manually”, but I believe this is what is happening there…

@Thurston – I assume this is due to the slowdown in Matlab’s new graphics system (HG2) in R2014b, for some graphic aspects. In your case, using patches probably implies use of the OpenGL renderer, which is a known performance hotspot. MathWorks are actively working on improving HG2’s performance, but it’s not simple and so far (R2015b) they have not been successful in restoring Matlab graphics performance to HG1’s levels. I suggest that you report this issue to MathWorks so that they could look into it and possibly fix it in a future release.

I am trying generate a GUI that has a a few patches in it. Even with relatively few patches with 600 faces I experience significant performance issues with the GUI when it redraws. Could the difference in adding a backdrop verse using a patch be a performance issue?

@Michelle – Thanks for the correction. I guess this proves one of the important fallacies in any intelligence work, of connecting dots between seemingly-connected events that are in fact unrelated. It’s a constant risk that I take with my speculation work on this blog, and hopefully I’m not too far off most of the time. It’s much safer not to speculate at all, but there’s no fun in that 🙂

In any case, perhaps your earlier work on your FEX utility back in 2010 led you (even if only on a subconscious level) to the need to add this functionality as an HG2 axes property. After all, you posted the utility as an answer to some user need, and I can definitely see this need arising in various forms over the years. Since in the back of your mind you already had the idea of a gradient backdrop, I can imagine that at some meeting where this came up you’d say something along the lines of “why not add a Backdrop property in the brand-new HG2 axes that we’re now designing?“. Pure speculation again, of course. But if I’m right, then perhaps I wasn’t too far off in connecting the dots here after all.

I know that I have often encountered problems in my work that I solved in a certain way, only to discover that I handled the same problem in the past in a very similar manner. So maybe I was influenced by some distant subconscious memory of my earlier solution, or maybe my mind is simply wired in such a way that I rediscover the same solution to the same problem.