That is probably similar to source code vs compiled object code. The textual graphic code is the human readable source code for describing the graphic. Readin

That is probably similar to source code vs compiled object code. The textual graphic code is the human readable source code for describing the graphic. Reading and parsing them are similar to interpret them. To make things faster, you can read them (compile) ahead of time and write the binary objects to binary files. In runtime loading them will be fast.