Not sure I can agree with you. I think vector drawing can be better in both size and drawing speed.
It depends a lot on the representation. Bitmap will not get a lot better than what we've got at the moment with JPeg or Gif. Vector representations can vary wildly in compactness and rendering speed. Eg. SVG bad, CSS gradients good. SVG bad, EPS/PDF good.
Obviously drawing from CPU can be much quicker than reading from disk. And if you draw into the GPU buffer first you get all of the advantages of GPU acceleration later.
And it can be much more bandwidth efficient.
Take streaming a bitmap over http. You have to take the penalty of the PNG header, the penalty of assembling a data:url and a 33% fixed penalty for Base64 encoding the binary bits.
So to stream a 1x256px gradient sprite there is a shedload of wasted bits.
If you're in vector land you can just send the gradient endpoints.
If you're not in WebKit land or with pre-sent vector algorithms (rare) you also have to stream the vector drawing code. In that case you can ammortize the cost of the drawing code with a simpler/smaller wire representation.
It depends a lot on the representation. Bitmap will not get a lot better than what we've got at the moment with JPeg or Gif. Vector representations can vary wildly in compactness and rendering speed. Eg. SVG bad, CSS gradients good. SVG bad, EPS/PDF good.
Obviously drawing from CPU can be much quicker than reading from disk. And if you draw into the GPU buffer first you get all of the advantages of GPU acceleration later.
And it can be much more bandwidth efficient.
Take streaming a bitmap over http. You have to take the penalty of the PNG header, the penalty of assembling a data:url and a 33% fixed penalty for Base64 encoding the binary bits.
So to stream a 1x256px gradient sprite there is a shedload of wasted bits.
If you're in vector land you can just send the gradient endpoints.
If you're not in WebKit land or with pre-sent vector algorithms (rare) you also have to stream the vector drawing code. In that case you can ammortize the cost of the drawing code with a simpler/smaller wire representation.