Ill try to explain my situation as best as I can, sorry if it is not too clear...
I have a Viewport3D that contains some large 3d rectangles that are like big crystals.
When the user click on one of the crystals, I add a new material to the crystal in the spot the use clicked using an ImageBrush. I then iterate over a list of bitmaps (List<BitmapImage> collection) and update the ImageBrush each frame to create an animation on the 3D crystal.
This works nice and I have up to 5 different effects playing on the crystals, but after profiling my application, I have discovered that due to mipmaps (I think) and the way 3d renders, my video memory jumps through the roof!!
By my calculation, if I have a 75 frame animation, by 400x400 running at 4 bytes per pixel, and having ~5 different animations piled up, you can see how this can get large :)
75 * 400 * 400 * 4 * 5 = ~250MB
this is an issue, not only because of the size, but also, the BitmapImages stay in Video Memory until I make them null, which is very annoying and performance costly.
My idea to fix this is to change from having List<BitmapImage> collection, to having a List<Byte[]> and rather than updating an ImageSource, I would like to try to use a WriteableBitmap that write the bytes to it.
The issue is I have no idea how to read bytes from a PNG file, then create a WriteableBitmap and write the bytes to it over and over in an efficient manor.
Can anyone please help me out?