[PD] GEM: displaying Pictures on MIDI Keyboard events, pix_image vs. pix_imageInPlace

[Peter Todd]

> as far as i understood the help patches i should use pix_imageInPlace
> instead of pix_image because of better performance.
> i do not get the usage of pix_imageInPlace it does not really work for
> me, where is the problem?

OK, it looks like [pix_multiimage] works a bit more like [pix_image], only 
without the need to load them from disk each time, as they are all loaded 
into RAM.

[pix_imageInPlace], on the other hand, loads the images to texture RAM (and 
as such is not used with the [pix_texture] object, as this is already done). 
As such, these images cannot be processed with subsequent [pix_*] objects

> i was comparing the performance of LZW compressed tiffs and
> uncompressed ones, and had the impression that without compression it
> runs a bit better. do you agree?

At a guess, when you load the compressed images to memory (of whichever 
sort), the computer decompresses them (so that the image in memory is 
uncompressed).  If you are using [pix_image], it would need to do this 
often, whereas with the other objects it would only happen once when you 
load them.  So, when you get things working with objects other than 
[pix_image], by this logic, it would no longer make any difference wether 
the images were compressed.  I think.

I've not actually directly used these objects significantly, though, so this 
is a bit speculative.

Cheers,

Peter