My colleague often says something along the lines of:
I don’t know why everyone has a desktop wallpaper its nothing but a waste of memory
I thought that this sounded somewhat like an urban myth and decided to see if there was any evidence to support or dispell this claim. Well it turns out that although the wallpaper is pushed to video memory for rendering it cant be kept there as if it were just general purpose RAM. So the wallpaper does have to be stored in conventional memory, but is it a waste?
Well assuming a resolution of 1280×1024 and a 32bpp color (4 bytes per pixel) we get:
1280 × 1024 × 4 = 5 MiB
So I am wasting 5 MiB of my 8 GiB of RAM. As a percentage:
5/8192 × 100 ≈ 0.0006%
But yes it is a bit of a waste, I should probably turn off my desktop wallpaper.
