ladies and (mostly) gents, i believe i have solved image loading times.
i found a problem with how i was loading images, it did not affect loading times much but it did cause lots of stuttering while achieving nothing, so now stutters while scrolling and loading images are gone (unless the stutters are caused by gpu/driver, like in some cases of astc compression, or by the operating system lagging). (for those curious, i was forcing python's garbage collector to run after images finished loading and applying, but turns out this data was actually freed automatically instantly without garbage collector, so it was just wasting time and stuttering by searching the whole process memory space for unreferenced objects to clean, when there were none)
ive also made it so gifs start applying (transferring to gpu) the first frames while they arent fully loaded yet, though it is still only one image being loaded at a time, sequentially, as this is a cpu and storage bound operation and will not benefit from parallelization.
and now, if more than one image has already been loaded but not applied (transferred to gpu) yet, it will apply some frames from all images in the apply queue, so you start seeing them sooner without waiting for them to apply all frames in a sequential queue. this is only noticeable with texture compression enabled, without it images load so slow that applying them does not benefit from this parallelization.
finally, added a new option to start loading images that arent yet visible but close to it, basically less than 1 window height scroll away. it makes the experience worse without texture compression, as it is loading images you arent seeing first; but with texture compression it means that images load super fast how they would anyway, and when you scroll they are actually already loaded.
so now, with:
- tex compress: bc7
- unload off-screen: yes
- preload nearby images: yes
its possible to *not* see image loading times, even when scrolling by very fast, and have as little vram usage as possible.
of course, the downside is still that bc7 compression takes time when compressing the image the first time (and thats why these options are opt-in), but after that images will load without even noticing, i never see a single black rectangle from an image loading anymore.
and obviously, results may vary depending on system specs like cpu gpu and storage speed, these changes and options mean that it is possible to not have loading times but doesnt mean everyone will have the same results with them.
its all in the latest beta build btw
