I need to generate some large graphs whose width and height can go up to millions of pixels in size. Please note that I do NOT want to scale down the image. Each point must represent one pixel.
Now using the Bitmap and Graphics objects, this is very much possible if I split the image into smaller squares but it is painfully slow.
I already calculate the pixel RGB values so was wondering if there is a way to create a byte array with these values and manually save them as an uncompressed BMP format file instead of dealing with the Bitmap class and the drawing functions of the Graphics class.
I am comfortable with unsafe code if that helps to speed up the process.
(While there is good question if anything will be able to read such files…)
BMP format is very simple – you can write it directly to disk (I’d recommend avoiding building huge file in memory unless you have other reasons to do so). There is a fixed-size header and then (for 24bpp) sequences of colors aligned on some width. Assuming you can pick width you will not even need to add any padding – just rows of colors for each pixel.