Are there any known size/space limitation of QPixmap
and/or QImage
objects documented? I did not find any useful information regarding this. I'm currently using Qt 4.7.3 on OSX and Windows. Particulary I'm interested in:
- Width/Height limits?
- Limits depending on color format?
- Difference between 32/64 bit machines?
- Difference regarding OS?
I would naively suspect that memory is the only limitation, so one could calculate max size by
width x height x byte_per_pixel
I assume that there is a more elaborate rule of thumb; also 32 bit machines may have addressing problems when you run into GB dimensions.
In the end I want to store multiple RGBA images of about 16000x16000 pixel in size and render them using transparency onto each other within a QGraphicsScene
. The workstation available can have a lot of RAM, let's say 16GB.
tl;dr: What size limits of QImage/QPixmap are you aware of, or where can I find such information?
Edit: I'm aware of the tiling approach and I'm fine with that. Still it would be great to know the things described above.
Thanks!
Both are limited to 32767x32767 pixels. That is, you can think of them as using a signed 16-bit value for both the X and Y resolution.
No axis can ever exceed 32767 pixels, even if the other axis is only 1 pixel. Operating system "bitness" does not affect the limitation.
The underlying system may run into other limits, such as memory as you mentioned, before such a huge image can be created.
You can see an example of this limitation in the following source code:
http://git.zx2c4.com/qt/plain/src/gui/image/qpixmap_x11.cpp
if (uint(w) >= 32768 || uint(h) >= 32768) {
w = h = 0;
is_null = true;
return;
}
Building on the answer by @charles-burns, here is relevant source code for QImage:
QImageData *d = 0;
if (format == QImage::Format_Invalid)
return d;
const int depth = qt_depthForFormat(format);
const int calc_bytes_per_line = ((width * depth + 31)/32) * 4;
const int min_bytes_per_line = (width * depth + 7)/8;
if (bpl <= 0)
bpl = calc_bytes_per_line;
if (width <= 0 || height <= 0 || !data
|| INT_MAX/sizeof(uchar *) < uint(height)
|| INT_MAX/uint(depth) < uint(width)
|| bpl <= 0
|| height <= 0
|| bpl < min_bytes_per_line
|| INT_MAX/uint(bpl) < uint(height))
return d; // invalid parameter(s)
So here, bpl
is the number of bytes per line, which is effectively width * depth_in_bytes
. Using algebra on that final invalid test:
INT_MAX/uint(bpl) < uint(height)
INT_MAX < uint(height) * uint(bpl)
INT_MAX < height * width * depth_in_bytes
So, your image size in total must be less than 2147483647 (for 32-bit ints).
I actually had occasion to look into this at one time. Do a search in the source code of qimage.cpp
for "sanity check for potential overflows" and you can see the checks that Qt is doing. Basically,
- The number of bytes required (width * height * depth_for_format) must be less than
INT_MAX
.
- It must be able to
malloc
those bytes at the point you are creating the QImage
instance.
Are you building a 64 bit app? If not, you are going to run into memory issues very quickly. On Windows, even if the machine has 16GB ram, a 32 bit process will be limited to 2GB (Unless it is LARGEADDRESSAWARE then 3GB). A 16000x16000 image will be just under 1 GB, so you'll only be able to allocate enough memory for 1, maybe 2 if you are very lucky.
With a 64 bit app you should be able to allocate enough memory for several images.