Okay, silly me.
Turned out that loading the image from the RamStream was fast...but streaming the data from the file into the RamStream was really slow (took about 700 ms). While I could simply space the streaming out over a couple of seconds, I thought - "Well, why don't I just try loading direct from the file stream."
Not sure why but I didn't think I could do that and hadn't tried up to that point. Turns out that loading from the file stream is just as fast as loading from the RamStream, and doesn't incur the overhead cost of moving the data from the file to the Ramstream.
So now, loading direct from the filestream, I'm getting a load time of about 5-20 ms (the exact range I was getting with the ramstream).
I'm not sure if this is well known or not but for those who aren't aware, it appears that you can cut down your load times drastically ( on this comp, comparing best case speeds and worst case speeds, it was about 10-15 times faster) if you call LoadImage, LoadAnimImage, or LoadPixmap directly on a filestream, instead of simply specifying the file path.
Turned out that loading the image from the RamStream was fast...but streaming the data from the file into the RamStream was really slow (took about 700 ms). While I could simply space the streaming out over a couple of seconds, I thought - "Well, why don't I just try loading direct from the file stream."
Not sure why but I didn't think I could do that and hadn't tried up to that point. Turns out that loading from the file stream is just as fast as loading from the RamStream, and doesn't incur the overhead cost of moving the data from the file to the Ramstream.
So now, loading direct from the filestream, I'm getting a load time of about 5-20 ms (the exact range I was getting with the ramstream).
I'm not sure if this is well known or not but for those who aren't aware, it appears that you can cut down your load times drastically ( on this comp, comparing best case speeds and worst case speeds, it was about 10-15 times faster) if you call LoadImage, LoadAnimImage, or LoadPixmap directly on a filestream, instead of simply specifying the file path.