As I discovered in the previous articles, loaded bitmaps are stored in memory in two forms: the compressed PNG, JPEG, JPEG-XR, GIF file and the uncompressed RGBA pixels. If you don’t use the pixels, Flash Player will reclaim its memory and then uncompress it if you use the bitmap later on. However, if you do plan to use the bitmap, isn’t the compressed file data just memory overhead? Today’s article will show you how to dump this unused file data and save a bunch of memory.
Posts Tagged bitmap
Keeping Bitmaps Decompressed
Jan 21
It came to my attention in the comments of Preloading Bitmap Decompression that Flash Player would actually free the decompressed bitmap memory if you didn’t make active use of it, similar to garbage collection. So if you followed my strategy from that article to preload a bitmap, it may have been un-preloaded for you by Flash Player! Today’s article shows you how to work around this little problem.
Since they were introduced way back in Flash Player 8, bitmaps have become a core feature in almost all Flash apps. The way you handle them—creation, operations, and destroying—is one of the most important factors determining your app’s performance. Today’s article shows one little-known trick to help out the performance of loading and using bitmaps.
Textures are usually simple bitmaps, but what if you wanted to use something more dynamic? How about a SWF you’ve created in Flash Professional? How about a Sprite or MovieClip you’ve created in code? Today’s article will show you how to do just that.
Stage3D Draw Calls: Part 1
Feb 20
There’s no doubt that Flash 11′s new Stage3D API can produce some amazing results by giving us access to the power of the user’s video card/GPU. However, it’d be a mistake to blindly assume that it is always faster than the traditional Flash display list (i.e. Stage). Today’s article begins a series that discusses the topic of “draw calls” and how they heavily impact the performance of your application.
