Comments on: Vector vs. Bitmap: file-size and performance

By: Christian Snodgrass

Christian Snodgrass — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 08:10:48 +0000

Thanks for this great post.

I’m working on a new game engine so I’ve been learning all I can about optimizing stuff in Flash and ActionScript 3 so you can get every bit of juice out of it.

This is a great example of how there can be a bonus in performance between using Vector and Bitmaps.

This will definitely help me make decisions when it comes to dealing with various graphics.

By: Robby

Robby — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:25:41 +0000

Wow, this was a nice test. I was never aware that bitmaps were such better performance wise than vectors. Vectors took around 55% cpu usage on my machine, while the bitmap took around 6%. HUGE increase.

By: dave teh bummer

dave teh bummer — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:49:40 +0000

i like to hold my balls and hit my cock with a hammer

By: bum rape

bum rape — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:16:12 +0000

my ass hurts

By: Peter Shipman

Peter Shipman — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:47:01 +0000

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By: chris

chris — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:31:08 +0000

Surprisingly for me, the frame rate didn’t change much, but when I viewed the CPU usage in Activity Monitor, I spiked big time going to the vector.

By: Rach

Rach — Tue, 15 May 2007 10:25:15 +0000

Thank you so much for this information. It has helped me a lot with my assignment. I found your site on Google! Keep the knowledge coming!!

By: xoc

xoc — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:57:32 +0000

Thanks for the example. Its very useful and succinct. I knew the speedup would be big, but I didn’t realise it would be that dramatic. It should be noted though, that the performance advantage is greatly reduced by increasing the bitmap size and/or simplifying the vector version.

By: Stephen Harris

Stephen Harris — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 04:40:43 +0000

I make flash games and spend more time than I’d like trying to improve framerates when running in a browser.

I made a car racing game, where the car stays in the middle of the screen and the map moves around it. I had to make the map a bitmap in order to get any decent framerate.

However, bitmaps aren’t all joy and wonder. If you scale or rotate the bitmap object in flash, it resamples it. Needless to say, this makes them render even slower than vector objects.

What would be cool to see is another example swf like your first one, that demonstrates framerates when the object is scaled and/or rotated.

Cheers!

Stephen

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 13:51:18 +0000

What..?