1.12.0 was released March 23, 2012, so if the performance was due to changes to cairo, it would show up in the changelog for prior to this period.
And in fact I notice that in Feb/Mar of that year there was a considerable amount of work done in src/win32 when the win32 code was split out and rebased to the new compositor infrastructure. I don't see any noteworthy perfomance work done in win32 subsequent to March 23rd. So, guessing maybe there was some unfinished performance work, at least for certain breeds of hardware?
1.12.0 was released March 23, 2012, so if the performance was due to changes to cairo, it would show up in the changelog for prior to this period.
And in fact I notice that in Feb/Mar of that year there was a considerable amount of work done in src/win32 when the win32 code was split out and rebased to the new compositor infrastructure. I don't see any noteworthy perfomance work done in win32 subsequent to March 23rd. So, guessing maybe there was some unfinished performance work, at least for certain breeds of hardware?