Which is faster? Using Quartz & CGRects vs an array UIImageViews

Question

Just wondering weather its faster, if you have lots (~several hundred to a thousand) 2D images, to use Quartz or an array of UIImageViews. Cheers!

Answer 1

Quartz is the lower-level drawing engine, so in theory, Quartz functions will be at least as fast as things from UIKit (which relies on Quartz). But that said, I assume you don't plan to show several hundred images simultaneously on the iPhone screen? Creating hundreds of UIImageViews is unlikely to be memory efficient, and you'd want to go another way. If you only show a few UIImageViews on the screen at a time, then you can reuse them, and the question goes away.

There are other options between Quartz (Core Graphics and I assume you mean a custom -drawRect:) and UIImageView. You can also use CALayers, which are quite fast and memory efficient.