DRD Team

Tonight I was mesing around with some PNGs and I noticed that my WAD file size shrunk dramatically when I replaced some old Doom format graphics with PNGs using an optimised palette. So, I'm tempted to replace a whole load more of my custom textures too. However, before I do this, I'd like to know if GZDoom is likely to be able to read them quicker, or slower from the disk of if there will be no difference.

Based on pure file size, I'd think that smaller=quicker to load. However, remembering the "good old days" of much slower machines, compressed formats would often take considerably longer to load than uncompressed ones because the program doing the loading has to decompress them as well.

So, does Graf, or anyone else, know - what would GZDoom read quicker, a native format Doom texture or a PNG with an optimised palette?

Decoding the Doom patch format is not the most efficient thing as well. Overall the decoding time doesn't really matter. It takes longer to prepare the texture and upload it into texture memory than decoding the image.

OK, thanks. That covers what I need to know.