Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> To add to what others have said. It's usualy best to use a compressed format instead
of a bitmap. 
> JPG and PNG are good choices. It can realy shorten the parsing of the file. It can
also prevent the 
> use of the swap file by reducing the memory useage, and that can have a dramatic
effect to the 
> parcing and render time.

  Please don't get offended if I'm a bit blunt, but please, if you don't
really know how POV-Ray works internally, don't spread your assumptions.

  You seem to somehow assume that POV-Ray stores a JPG or PNG as it is
in memory, without decompressing it.
  This, of course, would be technically almost impossible. POV-Ray needs
to read pixels from image maps at random and that just cannot be done from
a compressed JPG or PNG directly. Those image formats need to be
decompressed before they can be used. (Even if someone developed a way
to keep the images compressed on memory and only decompressing them as
needed, that would make the rendering quite a lot slower, not faster as
you seem to believe.)

  POV-Ray, naturally, keeps the images in memory in raw format. It has to.
There's no other way to randomly access them.

  The only things JPG and PNG will save is disk space, but that's it.
They will not make POV-Ray take less memory, they will not have any
effect on render times (compared to uncompressed image formats) and they
will certainly not shorten parsing time in any way.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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