I like the idea of loading the images in the background, or more specifically on another lower priority thread that can have its speed reduced before the main render loop - not sure how to do this in MP. I notice that this would provide the load effect that I see on my Mac - the cover flow on a Mac loaded all the frames immediately (low overhead) and the images appear as they are loaded; the performance of the cover flow never degraded. Getting the load out of the render loop is the key. Have any ideas how to do this?
We should have some generic threaded loading for all gfx items, not just to try to tweak cover flow only. Unfortunately such big changes cannot be done for 1.2.0, but instead they should be targeted for possible future versions. It is just too much risk of regression (even for making that canhe for cover flow only) and after all we are already in feature freeze.