Gif auto scaling to 8k

[Yung_Pixel]

I'm trying to set a small 1k pixel art gif as a wallapper but when i import it, it becomes an 8k texture file taking up 0.7gb of vram. The gif itself is just 0.5mb. Is there a way of disabling this scaling?

[Tim]

GIFs are very bad when it comes to VRAM usage due to the way that graphics cards have to render them in the context of a "video game engine" (and Wallpaper Engine is really just a simple video game engine). Try converting the GIF to an .mp4 and the issue should go away.

[Yung_Pixel]

Pixel art as mp4 looks rather horrible, I would be okay with the high vram usage if the GIF stayed as large as the original and not as an 8000x8000 file. Is there truly no way to just disable that automated scaling or scale it back down after import?

[Tim]

With the right video codec, you should not be able to notice any significant changes (if at all) compared to GIF. The scaling itself has no influence on this. You should be able to just take the original resolution, turn it into a video and then use that as a wallpaper. Wallpaper Engine will automatically scale it for you. You can also share the GIF just so I can take a proper look at your use-case.

[Yung_Pixel]

Link to the GIF I'm interested in can be seen below.
I have tried H.265 which didnt seem to work inside wallpaper engine and H.264 which produced a very lossy result. I'm intending to use it on a 1920x1080 screen.

https://moer.tel/media/pixelart/drive-by-night.gif

[Biohazard]

The problem is that this GIF is scaled to fake pixel art on any display.

Each "pixel" uses 25 actual pixels which is a huge waste of memory and it also has 144 frames, not really necessary for what it looks like.

You could try resizing it first and divide the width and height by 5 to get rid of the pixel waste. Wallpaper Engine uses the correct filter by default so it will still look crisp even without the fake scaling and this should immensely reduce the memory usage.

[Yung_Pixel]

I have scaled the gif down to be 1 real pixel per source pixel. Which the pixels were actually 4x4 grids before so a reduction to 25% the size. This yielded a Wallpaper Engine Texture after import of 4096x4096 which is still far bigger than necessary but the vram usage is down to 65mb which i'm okay with. Thank you very much.

[Biohazard]

Ah, yes, my DPI scaling tricked me into thinking it was 5x5 pixels instead of 4x4. FYI 4096x4096 is the size of the sheet that holds all of the GIF frames so it sounds like it now works as intended, yeah.