Full screen imagebuttons and performance.

[Gachapen]

I am currently using full resolution, 1920x1080 PNG image buttons with most of the pixels being transparent. I am doing this for the simplicity of positioning them. I create and position them in photoshop against the backgrounds, then export. They are like 98% transparent and only 45kb in size. I then use the same image as the focus mask in instances where a hover is not needed. Everything works great.

My question is, over time will this effect performance, and why? I have noticed slow down in some areas and am wondering if it is because of these buttons. They are mostly transparent and so tiny, so I am unsure how it could be them. Thank you.

[Ocelot]

Yeah, buttons overlapping like that are killing perfomance.

IIRC even if your image is mostly transparent, it will still take a large amount of cache. If you have more than several screen worth of those images (for full screen image it means just several images), they won't fit in cache. And since your buttons take the whole screen, eac time you do something, like move your mouse, it has to go over all images, potentially loading some from disc and test if that pixel is transparent or not.

[Gachapen]

Yeah, buttons overlapping like that are killing perfomance.

IIRC even if your image is mostly transparent, it will still take a large amount of cache. If you have more than several screen worth of those images (for full screen image it means just several images), they won't fit in cache. And since your buttons take the whole screen, eac time you do something, like move your mouse, it has to go over all images, potentially loading some from disc and test if that pixel is transparent or not.

Thank you for the info!