Forums » Help » More layers more pre rendering, or less layers and less pre rendering

Assuming my map is very large (800x630 tiles)... I'm thinking about pre rendering what layers I can to boost performance.

However some tiles will not be pre-rendered because they are animated. So I'm considering two options:

Pre render 1 layer that has no animated tiles;
Leave the other layer regular because it has animated tiles.

OR

Pre render both layers, but create a third layer which I only place animated tiles.

In essence, what I'm asking is: is it better to keep the amount of layers down, or utilize pre rendering as much as possible?

Pre-rendering very large layers may not be a good idea. You have to understand what it does. I talked about it in this thread.

So assuming a tilesize of 16px, and a map size of 800x630:
800 * 16 * 630 * 16 = 129024000 pixels * 4bpp = 516096000 bytes

I.e. your pre-rendered layer would need 492MB of RAM.


To answer your question: it depends. It's all about the number of draw calls needed. If you have a big screen size and very small tiles, pre-rendering may help a lot. If you have a small screen and big tiles, pre-rendering does nothing.

Yeah, it would appear pre-rendering is not the way to go at the moment with my current set up. For kicks, I set a couple layers to pre-render and watched my chrome.exe process eat just under 1GB of memory!

Thanks Dominic.