Sure, if you don't break it down to individual pixels, the data is way less. Ultimately, getting a well-performing GC is finding enough idle/spare/background cy

Sure, if you don't break it down to individual pixels, the data is way less. Ultimately, getting a well-performing GC is finding enough idle/spare/background cycles to scan memory and recycle it at a greater rate than allocation. If the GC falls behind then inevitably you are going to end up with a big pause. I don't think there's enough memory bandwidth to decode 4k video the naive way, but a small terminal will probably be OK. That said, it's still less efficient than just poking the bytes in memory.