1) I'm using a total of 20 frames for a swaying animation, at an animation speed of 10 (10 frames per second?) so it looks pretty smooth for an atmospheric effect. Is that going to cause a lot of slowdown? Knowing that every tree on a map will have at least one 20 frame animation, and possible a second 20-30 frame animation for stronger winds? I'm using big maps. Maps with over 100 trees are going to be common.
2) The size of the trees in pixels are 512x512, and 1024x1024. I remember reading that some GPUs find large image sizes difficult to render, and that performance is significantly improved if you break the images up into smaller tiles, then piece them back together in the editor. Would images of this size cause slowdown? Or is this just concerning tiled backgrounds on large maps? I have a GPU with 1GB of VRAM, but I'd like it to run on cards with 256mb smoothly enough.
Any feedback on improving performance would be greatly appreciated. It's frustrating having to wait upwards of 60 seconds with a 'Construct is not responding' message every time I want to test my layout. Clearly, i'm doing something stupid

Thanks for reading! ^^