Ways to optimize Monogame Windows Phone 8 project

Question

Heey,

We are currently busy with porting our game to Windows Phone 8 and other platforms but we walked into an issue. We created it on Windows 8 targeting Full HD with our assets and are now porting it to WP8 focussing 720p. But the issue is the Win8 version already eats 550mb of ram whereof 98,8% are textures. The phone version after resizing the assets to 720p is using ~230 ram. This is to much voor the 512mb phones and even the 1gb phones are sometimes struggling. So knowing how much ram we use I started to look around for ways to optimize mainly our WP8 version and couldn't find alot.

What I've found so far is only to use DXT compression on our textures which forces us to remake our assets to a factor of 2 which is a lot work and then also on the coding side. So I was wondering are their any other options in optimizing ram usage in Monogame other than DXT or are we bound to it and have to make it work?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Using 2D art your compression possibility's are indeed a little bit restricted to only down scaling or changing the Bit depth without losing enormous levels of detail which is the case by the DXT compression.

From normal assets of 32bit depth it's doable to compress the assets to 24bit or 16bit (8bit will leave you with only 256 colors which is nowadays way to few for decent graphics unless you're ofcourse making a retro game or game that suits those graphics ;)) Doing this will grant you a 25% or 50% profit in video memory/ram usage of your game.

Besides compressing you should also think of unloading content or don't load content that you don't use. In case you load all your assets in the menu while you only need the menu assets or loading multiple levels while only using 1. This together with the first point should help you press down the memory by pretty big numbers and make the footprint small enough for mobiles to.