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Using a Cached Bitmap to Improve Performance

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Image and Bitmap objects store images in a device-independent format. A CachedBitmap object stores an image in the format of the current display device. Rendering an image stored in a CachedBitmap object is fast because no processing time is spent converting the image to the format required by the display device.

The following example creates a Bitmap object and a CachedBitmap object from the file Texture.jpg. The Bitmap and the CachedBitmap are each drawn 30,000 times. If you run the code, you will see that the CachedBitmap images are drawn substantially faster than the Bitmap images.

Bitmap        bitmap(L"Texture.jpg");
UINT          width = bitmap.GetWidth();
UINT          height = bitmap.GetHeight();
CachedBitmap  cBitmap(&bitmap, &graphics);
int           j, k;
for(j = 0; j < 300; j += 10)
   for(k = 0; k < 1000; ++k)
     graphics.DrawImage(&bitmap, j, j / 2, width, height);
for(j = 0; j < 300; j += 10)
   for(k = 0; k < 1000; ++k)
      graphics.DrawCachedBitmap(&cBitmap, j, 150 + j / 2 );

Note

A CachedBitmap object matches the format of the display device at the time the CachedBitmap object was constructed. If the user of your program changes the display settings, your code should construct a new CachedBitmap object. The DrawImage method will fail if you pass it a CachedBitmap object that was created prior to a change in the display format.