Top 3 Animated Desktop Wallpaper Sites
Introduction
Animated wallpapers have motions and effects like screensavers, but they do not break up your work, and they always operate in the background while you are typing or surfing the Web. Also animated wallpapers are mostly made for enjoyment and offer relaxing, peaceful, or inspirational scenes. In this article we will take a look at and compare different animated wallpapers that are offered by several popular websites.
We will score each provider in the following categories:
- Performance:Measures how much resources the animation takes during operation and how it affects the computer speed.
- Collection: Range of themes available on the website.
- Usability: Measures how easy it is to install, uninstall, and manage animated themes on your computer.
- Quality: Quality and variability of each individual animation.
Feature
| Score
|
|---|---|
Performance
| 5/5
|
Collection
| 5/5
|
Usability
| 5/5
|
Quality
| 5/5
|
AWallpaperMill
Site link: www.awallpapermill.com
This is a relatively new website that offers technologically advanced and professionally created animated desktop wallpaper.
The site's collection is growing constantly and now counts about 100 nice hi-definition animated themes. All themes are stand-alone media files, and it is more than easy to set any of them as a Windows animated background; you need only download a file and click it.
All animated wallpapers are highly optimized; the average file size is from 2 to 5 Mb. When an animated theme is active, it "eats" only of a few percent of CPU time maximum! We really have not noticed any performance slowdown when testing these products.
The last thing to mention is that each animation is real time generated so when butterflies fly or leaves fall around your desktop, they always move among a unique path making the scene always unique.
Feature
| Score
|
|---|---|
Performance
| 5/5
|
Collection
| 5/5
|
Usability
| 4/5
|
Quality
| 5/5
|
DesktopPaints
Site link: www.desktoppaints.com
This site offers an animation tool for creative persons for whom ready-to-use themes are not enough and who want to create something of their very own.
DesktopPaints' Animated Wallpaper Maker is a handy animation tool that allows you to save animated scenes directly in animated wallpaper format. It has two options: You can use the built-in wallpaper manager or create stand-alone media files that can be played on any other Windows based PC or laptop.
The software editor is powerful, but very simple to use and, even though you need some time (usually a few minutes) to make your own background, it gives you endless opportunities in design and creativity. The only limitation is your imagination.
The performance of any custom wallpaper you will make is also excellent. In our tests, this software never took more than a few percent of CPU time and did not affect overall computer performance at all.
Feature
| Score
|
|---|---|
Performance
| 3/5
|
Collection
| 5/5
|
Usability
| 4/5
|
Quality
| 4/5
|
DeskScapes
DeskScapes is an old program that has been offering animated wallpapers (called "dreams") for many years. Each dream is a video file by itself, and it leads to two major disadvantages of this product.
First of all, a video stream cannot be accelerated properly on most video cards, and this means that animation is handled by the CPU. In our tests on mid-range video cards, dreams takes up to 30% of CPU time!
The next disadvantage affects the theme variability. With dream you will have to watch the same video clip again and again. If you still want to have dreams as your animated desktop background, you need DeskScapes installed first. Also it worth to noting that, because dreams are hi-definition videos, each of them is a quite large file, and it may take a long time to download them from DeskScapes' site.
As many other companies in the Web 2.0 era, StarDocs does not invest much in content development allowing the community to develop and maintain their dream collection. As result, on the DeskScapes site you will find tons of semi-professional animated themes as well as some very good ones.
Conclusion
AWallpaperMill is a wise choice for people who want to refresh their desktop with minimum effort. A wide range of quality content and outstanding performance are the main advantages of animated wallpapers from this developer.
DesktopPaints is number one for creative persons who like to spend some time to create something really unique and special.
DeskScapes is an outsider on our chart. Poor customization options and disappointing performance left this software behind our leaders.
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