Thanks to Radek’s tireless work, CWS cairocanvas is now finally integrated (into the 2.0.3 code line). Took about eight months to get there, and now provides a nicely anti-aliased slideshow experience, with even the alpha effects running at a decent speed.
The downside: you need a fairly recent X server and cairo 1.0.x on your system.
Thorsten's Weblog 