Our project contains two versions of the "splash" image, but one can be removed. Yes, this proposal will seem counter to some readers' assumptions, but bear with me...

With the current splash screen we start with a large version of the image ("splash_2X.png" at 1002x500). And then we make a lower-resolution version (501x250) using an external program (imagemagick). And then we include BOTH versions in the project. We then display the smaller version when scale is 1X (or smaller, which never happens) and the larger one is used at all other times and scaled to fit.

The intention of having two versions like this is to have a nicer result, but that is not the case. Instead we have a nicely resampled image at 1.0 and a native image at 2.0, but in between (and above and below) we see a fairly badly resized image.

This patch makes it so that only the larger image is ever used, but it improves the resizing. The end result is that the we obtain a result that is indistinguishable from current at scales 1.0 and at 2.0. But at every point between, above, and below are all better. And we lose the complexity of dealing with multiple image. And we save 205K from the project if we do not include the smaller image.

Following is a comparison at 1.0 scale. Current on the left, patch result on the right. You'd be hard-pressed to find any difference.

At 1.3X scale it looks similar, but if you look closely at the blender logo and awards, the right side is better.

At 2.0 scale they look virtually identical again (current on top, patch on bottom)

At 2.1X scale you see large differences with the current (top) showing odd artifacts on the logo and sheering in the award borders. The bottom is perfect.

So, as illustrated, we have one less file, have better results in the majority of cases, and never have worse result. And as a bonus the splash image is auto-sizing. So no matter what size image you put in there it will be scale to size, keeping proportions properly. Here is an example with the splash image swapped out for one that is 1920x1080p. Because the image is slightly taller the splash dialog is just a touch taller too. Shown here at 1.5X scale.

Boring technical details:

• Adds a uiDefButImage() helper function for making uiBut of type UI_BTYPE_IMAGE, in a way that we can override the color if desired.
• ui_draw_but_IMAGE() is altered to scale the image to the target size before drawing.
• wm_block_splash_image() altered to only use datatoc_splash_2x_png, and not do any checks for size or proportion.
• wm_block_create_splash() takes the image, scales it to our desired width, keeping the proportions of the image.