Dynamic images best practices

Uniview 2.0 added an easy interface to add images to your profile while Uniview Theater is running by dragging and dropping the images. The more images you have the more video memory you will consume. On disabling the images they are only hidden but are not unloaded. Which means that they still consume video memory.

A typical 2kx2k image (lets say it's a .jpg image) will consume around 16 MB of video memory ( 2048 x 2048 x 4 x 1.3 ( 1 byte for each RGBA channel and 1.3 for mipmap generation) ). 20 such images will take around 416 MB of video memory. Even though on disk, the size of the .jpg image maybe in KB (kilo bytes) due to compression, that is not the size when the image is unpacked in the GPU video memory.

Remember that there are other Uniview resources (textures, models) that are competing for these resources. Use lower resolution images if you want to use many such images or try loading less data in Uniview.

In Uniview 3.0 it would be possible to unload the dynamic images through property changes (that can be triggered in your panel presentation), so you will have more control over what is currently loaded and what is not. Also there are newer types of dynamic images like the slide show images which will facilitate loading more images but in a stream lined fashion and hence not consume more memory.