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

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..?

By: sectore

sectore — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 13:56:24 +0000

Aral,

thanks for your nice performance test. I have used your example for different tests with 1.000 dynamic text fields and they’ve been the same awesome results (from 1 fps to 33fps on my powerbook - OSX, FLP 9.0.16).

But don’t turn on the bitmap chaching for movieclips they’re constantly rotating, changing their sizes or contents because in this cases Flash redraws the bitmap every time and reduces this nice effect on the performance: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/bitmap_caching_03.html
Best,
sectore
–
http://www.websector.de/

By: aral

aral — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:50:35 +0000

Hi Tink,

Good point. Testing the above example in FireFox (OS X optimized Deer Park), FireFox consumes 68.20MB of real memory and 464.02MB of virtual memory when the object is a vector and 68.24MB of real memory and 464.06MB of virtual memory when the object is in bitmap mode.

By: Vector vs Bitmap « saumya

Vector vs Bitmap « saumya — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:15:06 +0000

[...] Here is a nice article about whether to use Vector or Bitmap inside Flash. It is really a tricky thing when working with animations whether its a scripted one or manual.But if we know what to do when, then our flash movie will rock. [...]

By: Tink

Tink — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 09:48:18 +0000

Its worth noting that bitmaps will reduce CPU but increase RAM i believe, so as you say its finding that happy balance.

By: LEE

LEE — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 03:53:58 +0000

Great example ! I’m surprised anyone thought different, but without seeing it for oneself, how would you know? Do you know of any good tutorials on using the Bitmap data class in AS 2?

By: Kristin Henry

Kristin Henry — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:12:11 +0000

Aral, great example! You changed the example while I was thinking I like the new one much better!