I have a PHP app that does a lot of image generation using GD right now. Ive had good luck with ImageMagick on other projects though. This is on an NT server, and so I usually call ImageMagick through a system-call (im not sure theres a plugin for it that will work on NT?)

Anyway, does anyone know what would be faster for just doing simple image creation and drawing text in to it? Or watermarking? Or is there really a speed difference?

The interesting thing about system calls is that they'll thread nicely on a SMP box, as far as I know. Thoughts?

more popular is gd. dont know why.. probably because of the speed ;/