Currently Impeller will always apply a Color or Image filter in an offscreen contents to create a new texture. That has a less than desierable interaction with ImageRepeat.repeat or others. The repeat logic is computed entirely in the framework, so the engine is not aware that its being given more or less identical (expect for offset) commands.

This could be optimized by allowing per-pass sharing of this texture.

This can be seen in the wonderous wonder page, where the paint texture is repeated once on either side. This results in 3x the fairly expensive draws.

This is likely an issue with drawImageNine as well.