Managed Images

A managed image is automatically cached in video memory (VRAM) by the JVM. When drawImage( ) is applied to its original version located in system memory (RAM), the JVM uses the VRAM cache instead, and employs a hardware copy (blit) to draw it to the screen. The payoff is speed since a hardware blit will be faster than a software-based copy from RAM to the screen. This idea is illustrated by Figure 5-6.

Figure 5-6. Drawing images and managed images

A managed image is not explicitly created by the programmer because there's no ManagedImage class that can be used to instantiate suitable objects. Managed images are created at the whim of the JVM, though the programmer can "encourage" the JVM to make them.

Image, ImageIcon, and BufferedImage objects qualify to become managed images if they have been created with createImage( ), createCompatibleImage( ), read in with getImage( ) or ImageIO's read( ), or created with the BufferedImage( ) constructor. Opaque images and images with BITMASK TRansparency (e.g., GIF files) can be managed. Translucent images can be managed but require property flags to be set, which vary between Windows and Linux/Solaris.

The JVM will copy an image to VRAM when it detects that the image has not been changed or edited for a significant amount of time; typically, this means when two consecutive drawImage( ) calls have used the same image. The VRAM copy will be scrapped if the original image is manipulated by an operation that is not hardware accelerated, and the next drawImage( ) will switch back to the RAM version.

Exactly which operations are hardware accelerated depends on the OS. Virtually nothing aside from image translation is accelerated in Windows; this is not due to inadequacies in DirectDraw but rather to the Java interface. The situation is a lot better on Linux/Solaris where all affine transformations, composites, and clips will be accelerated. However, these features depend on underlying OS support for a version of OpenGL that offers pbuffers. A pbuffer is a kind of off-screen rendering area, somewhat like a pixmap but with support for accelerated rendering.

Bearing in mind how the JVM deals with managed images, it is inadvisable to modify them excessively at run time since their hardware acceleration will probably be lost, at least for a short time.

In some older documentation, managed images are known as automated images.