Question

I am considering using sprites for an image heavy game.

I’m trying to determine whether any extra memory is allocated when sharing a single UIImage between image views. I ran a test by creating 40 image views, once with a single image and once by creating 40 image instances and they appeared to use the same amount of memory.

If extra memory is allocated per image view using a single image, what’s the use of using sprites?

Answer 1

I believe I’ve just answered my own question. It appears the memory allocations for both tests are the same because I was using imageNamed: to load the images. And as noted here: Dispelling the UIImage imageNamed: FUD

With respect to the general behavior of the cache, it does cache based on filename (so two instances of +imageNamed: with the same name should result in references to the same cached data)

I reran the test using imageWithContentsOfFile: and found that no extra memory was allocated when sharing the same UIImage.