Long looping animated backgrounds in a 2D game.

I have ambitious plans for having a looping but fairly long animated background, I’m talking 5-10 seconds loop, so we are talking 240 background images in the least.

I’m just wondering, if this is possible, where do the textures go in a 2D unity project? the ram? or the gpu ram? what about laptops that have hardly any gpu ram, does unity know to put it into the ram instead.

And is it possible to even play 24 hi res images per second (remember again, I’m not talking 1meg+ pngs, but jpegs that will be around 200k per image.)

Is this just a totally stupid idea overall? i can accept that as the answer if it is.

I’m not a pro in this but I’ll give it a shot.

AFAIK, the images will be loaded to the GPU Ram. So, in my opinion this is a bad idea because 200K Jpeg takes much more than that in memory.

E.g. If the texture is POT, lets say 1K *1K texture - this will take:

  • 4Mb with no compression - 960Mb total
  • 2Mb if 16-bit compression is used - 480Mb total
  • Approx 0.5Mb -1Mb if you use ETC (Android) or PVR (iOS) - 240Mb total

If you plan to have this running on mobile devices, its a definite no-no. If its for PC and you can use compression, than it might be OK.

**Converted to ‘Answer’ as I see that @Eric5h5 said the same thing regarding memory footprint.