Seth: I totally agree. Before I did the test I was ready to say use PNGs or JPEGs and leave BMPs well and truly alone. Now I am rethinking my position...
I might add that whoever was doing hundreds of loads in a loop was really benchmarking disk caching and not useful performance. Heck, if the decompression is being done in a well-written library, the decompressed images may well be being cached too (consider that a typical decompression task involves reassembling small GIFs and JPEGs for a web page, which are frequently re-used in a design).
I might add that whoever was doing hundreds of loads in a loop was really benchmarking disk caching and not useful performance. Heck, if the decompression is being done in a well-written library, the decompressed images may well be being cached too (consider that a typical decompression task involves reassembling small GIFs and JPEGs for a web page, which are frequently re-used in a design).