Comment 30 for bug 180693

@Steven: the filter quality can be set in Inkscape's preferences (but the options do not take effect in Inkscape 0.91, due to a bug - they work again in the prerelease versions, though).
Note that if you raise the filter quality, render time goes up (one difference with Firefox is that you don't edit the file, only want to look at it). I seem to remember that the banding in some filters was caused by some kind of hard limit, but I wasn't able to find the discussion where this was said, so I may be wrong.