Handcrafted Games Blog

Just a reference to Daniel Hai’s article on this from some time ago:

10000 operations of “BitmapData.draw()” 4068 ms 10000 operations of “new BitmapData()” : 2324 ms 10000 operations of “BitmapData.clone()” 1012 ms 10000 operations of “BitmapData.copyPixels()” 962 ms 10000 operations of “BitmapData.fillRect()” : 515 ms

…He doesn’t mention setPixel() or setPixel32() (the latter is reputedly faster in every case, don’t quote me on that though) here, as usually you won’t be assembling things pixel-by-pixel. Also, according to combined research done by Zevan, Piergiorgio Niero and some of their respective readers, it appears that BitmapData.setVector may approach comparable performance (example) if you are doing many iterations.