If the initial claim isn’t simply bullshit, I’d suspect it’s a tiling issue.
You could avoid special handling for solid-color backgrounds by using the image-as-background setup plus a solid-color image. And that image might as well be 1x1 px, right? But if image tiling is a loop that goes “open image, draw to buffer, close image” then you’re waiting on the filesystem about a million times… while it’s busy doing whatever the fuck Windows does at boot.
I have absolutely no idea if this is how any version of Windows does things. But even having pulled it from my own ass, I must say, it’s plausible. It’d be quick to slap together with primitive DirectX. You’d never notice it for an image that repeats, like, twice. (Did Windows 95 default to the felt-green background, or that dithered-to-hell blue image?) As computers got faster and Windows ballooned, it could stick around for a while.
You could avoid special handling for solid-color backgrounds by using the image-as-background setup plus a solid-color image. And that image might as well be 1x1 px, right? But if image tiling is a loop that goes “open image, draw to buffer, close image” then you’re waiting on the filesystem about a million times
This makes sense to me. But unfortunately, according to a comment above, using a smaller image and tiling it is actually the solution to the slow loading.
If the initial claim isn’t simply bullshit, I’d suspect it’s a tiling issue.
You could avoid special handling for solid-color backgrounds by using the image-as-background setup plus a solid-color image. And that image might as well be 1x1 px, right? But if image tiling is a loop that goes “open image, draw to buffer, close image” then you’re waiting on the filesystem about a million times… while it’s busy doing whatever the fuck Windows does at boot.
I have absolutely no idea if this is how any version of Windows does things. But even having pulled it from my own ass, I must say, it’s plausible. It’d be quick to slap together with primitive DirectX. You’d never notice it for an image that repeats, like, twice. (Did Windows 95 default to the felt-green background, or that dithered-to-hell blue image?) As computers got faster and Windows ballooned, it could stick around for a while.
But it still might be bullshit.
This makes sense to me. But unfortunately, according to a comment above, using a smaller image and tiling it is actually the solution to the slow loading.