Background and surfaces

[Niels]

I was thinking:
If I have a game where the gameroom is the same size as my view/resolution, and I want to draw my (non tiled) static background to it, could I just draw it to it's own surface (that doesn't get refreshed every tick to save textute swapping and processing power?

 

[Paskaler]

You'd still have to draw the surface every frame, unless you want artifacting. It would just be more hassle, since you'd have to keep track of whether the surface exists, then re-create it.

 

[Niels]

Hmm ok, so I won't gain anything from it?

 

[Paskaler]

I don't think so. I should've also mentioned, I'm no expert in surfaces, but, this is how my thinking went:

• You draw the BG to surface(GameMaker implicitly loads the texture page the BG is on into VRAM)
• The surface is loaded to VRAM as well
• You still have to issue a draw call to draw the surface on the screen

Just seems to me, there's more steps, as opposed to GameMaker just drawing the BG itself in a single step.