CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidimageandroid-drawablevector-graphics
goldenmaza
goldenmaza

Reputation: 159

Vector vs Image source (pros and cons)?

I would like to know what the pros and cons of using drawable vector shapes (XML files) vs image resources (png files) for icons (Material Design Icons)?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2212

Answers (3)

Davide Cannizzo
Davide Cannizzo

Reputation: 3134

The difference stands in vector images describing what they want to draw and raster images describing the color of each pixel, due to which these are heavier in size. Vector images can be resized flawlessly, while attempting it on raster images is always a bad idea, which makes those images lose their quality. Moreover, vector images are rendered slower than raster ones when there are many elements, due to the computations necessary to parse paths and shapes and draw them (indeed, vector images are more CPU intensive to render). Rather, it is faster if there are just few elements and paths have few points. Though vector images are lighter to load (in RAM; in fact they cannot be loaded in the GPU memory, unlike raster images), which makes them the fastest.
The important is, don't exceed with the number of elements in SVGs and other vector images. Otherwise, they'd end up being slower.

Upvotes: 3

Mohsen Mohseni
Mohsen Mohseni

Reputation: 70

It depends on your needs to use which one. you can change vectors attributes with xml code anywhere you want. but image resources has less Flexibility to control its attrs and use more memory

Upvotes: 0

Spectorsky
Spectorsky

Reputation: 667

As I see, the question refers to general alternative between raster (e.g. jpeg, png) and vector (e.g. eps image). In one sentence, vector can be easily scaled and required less memory, but is more complicated. In details, see e.g. here.

Upvotes: 1

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