CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidperformanceandroid-5.0-lollipopandroid-vectordrawable
ralph
ralph

Reputation: 153

When to use VectorDrawable?

Android Lollipop has introduced several new classes, one of them being VectorDrawable. I was just wondering when will it be suitable to use VectorDrawable over a bitmap image knowing VectorDrawable has a performance drawback. The only thing with VectorDrawable is scalability which comes at the cost of performance. So when is it that I can use a VectorDrawable if performance is the priority? Is the performance drop too high?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1741

Answers (2)

Tenghui Zhu
Tenghui Zhu

Reputation: 309

Note that VectorDrawable (comparing with BitmapDrawable), only has the initial drawing performance overhead. After the 1st frame the VectorDrawable show up, the framework will have a bitmap cache. From that on, all the performance of that VectorDrawable should be the same as the BitmapDrawable, as long as the size didn't change.

VectorDrawable is not recommended for huge background image, like full screen size, but for buttons and icons whose size is normally smaller than something like 200dp x 200dp. You should be able to use it without worrying too much about the performance.

Upvotes: 2

ahodder
ahodder

Reputation: 11439

I think the "performance drop", if present, would be acceptable. One would hope you are not creating a ton of vector drawables every frame. Presumably, you would load the VD once, cast it into a drawable at which point the vector drawable isn't needed anymore.

Really the only thing that I can see that would cause an issue, is if you are loading an absurd amount of them all at once. But why would you? At that point, just something like a presized sprite sheet.

Upvotes: 2

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