Back to General and Gameplay Programming

How is jpg so much smaller then bmp

giant · 2004-03-01T05:57:17

Hi. I am writing a platform game in DX8, and wanted to do it in 24bbp colour, so that the quality would be high. I was worried that the download would become huge, since a fullscreen bitmap at 24bpp is about 1MB on disk. I was talking to a friend and he said that .jpg is smaller and I should try it, so I ran an experiment. I had a desktop picture of space and stars with lens flare etc... quite a nice picture. It was something like 970kb in its 24bpp .bmp format. I then saved this as .jpg and looked at the file size. It was only 28kb. I opened both with IE, and the picture quality looked almost the same. Prehaps the bmp was better, I dont know. I might have been convincing myself that it should be considering the size difference. How is it that jpg can store a picture of aprox. the same quality in such a small size. Thanks Ciaran "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I''m not sure about the former." --Albert Einstein