Does the type of image matter when you’re compressing it to PNG? Does it affect performance? Size? This week’s article looks into these questions to find out how each of the PNG compressors performs on three different types of images: an icon, a photo, and random noise.
Posts Tagged bitmapdata
PNG Compressor Roundup
Feb 18
Flash Player has had built-in PNG compression since version 11.3. But how does it fare against all of the other PNG compressors out there? Does it compress faster? Does it produce smaller file sizes? Today’s article explores your options when it comes to compressing PNG files so you can get the fastest or smallest PNG possible.
Image Loading Performance
Feb 11
Which image format is fastest to load? That was perhaps the most relevant question in last week’s article, so it’s time to explore it more deeply. Today’s article examines differences between different types of PNG, JPEG, and JPEG-XR files to answer questions like “does the JPEG quality setting matter?” and “is indexed PNG faster than full (ARGB) PNG?” Read on for the test and all the details.
Are you using the fastest assets you can? Yes, even the file format of the assets you use has a big bearing on the performance of your app. Ask yourself: is PNG faster to decompress than JPEG? Is it faster to compress to JPEG-XR or PNG? Do the quality settings matter? Today’s article explores the performance of Flash’s main three image formats—PNG, JPEG, and JPEG-XR—to find out which decompresses fastest at load time and compresses fastest at save time.
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.
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.
Adobe has recently released tools to allow us to use compressed textures with the Stage3D API via their ATF tools. What are these compressed textures? Why would we want to use them? How do they work? Today’s article is an overview of compressed textures covering these questions and more.
Loop Speed Redux
Sep 24
AS3 has three kinds of loops—for, for-in, and for-each—but which is fastest? I attempted to answer that question about three years ago, but the article is in dire need of a followup as many version of Flash Player have been released since then and the question is core to our everyday lives as AS3 programmers. So which type of loop is fastest in 2012?
Stage3D Readback Performance
Oct 10
At long last, Flash Player 11 has been released and carries with it a raft of exciting new features. Perhaps most exciting is the inclusion of the new Stage3D class (and related libraries) to enable GPU-accelerated graphics rendering. Today’s article will be the first to cover this new API and discusses one of its features: reading back the rendered scene into a BitmapData that you can put on the regular Stage. Surely this will be a popular operation for merging 3D and 2D, so let’s see how fast it is!
