It’s been about seven months since my last test of AS3 versus JavaScript and there have been several major releases of both browsers and the Flash Player. Today, we pit every major browser against each other and Flash Player itself to get an updated picture of which provides the fastest scripting environment on the web.
Posts Tagged performance
Since Flash Player 11.4 was released we have finally been given the ability to run multiple threads of AS3 code to take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs. However, when we start writing this multi-threaded code we immediately run into the requirement to coordinate the threads by passing messages between them. As it turns out, this is quite slow in AS3. Read on for the performance analysis.
Whether you’re using Adobe Scout or good old getTimer, there is a fundamental limitation: all times are in whole milliseconds. This is an issue if you’re trying to measure code that executes very quickly or compare code that has only minor differences. In these cases you get inconsistent results (7ms, 8ms, 7ms, 7ms, 8ms, …) when you’d much rather have better accuracy (7.3ms) with sub-millisecond precision. Today’s article introduces a new helper class called Timely that makes sub-millisecond precision a snap. Read on for the source code and an example app.
In last week’s primer on the new domain memory (“Alchemy”) opcodes the initial test showed that they couldn’t match the performance of good old Vector when writing out a lot of float/Number values. Today’s article expands on that test to check the performance of writing integers and the performance of reading integers and float/Number values. Can the domain memory opcodes redeem themselves? Read on to find out.
Since January, Adobe has dropped the “premium features” requirement for Flash apps that use the “domain memory opcodes” (a.k.a. “Alchemy opcodes”) that provide low-level performance-boosting operations that let you deal more-or-less directly with blocks of memory. Then in February we got Flash Player 11.6 along with built-in ASC 2.0 support for this feature. Today’s article shows you how to use these opcodes and takes a first stab at improving performance with them. Are they really all they’re cracked up to be?
Today’s article is in response to the many requests to include Adobe AIR in the “Flash vs. HTML5” series of articles. While it’s not a browser-based competitor, it certainly is a competing platform on iOS and Android. So I’ve taken the “Stage3D vs. WebGL” test and packaged it as an AIR app. How does AIR compare? Read on to find out.
The “Flash vs. HTML5” series has covered bitmap drawing pretty well by now, but what about text rendering? Virtually every game has text in it and sometimes a lot. Quest text, name tags, button labels, tooltips, and so on combine to fill the screen with quite a bit of the stuff. So how does Flash’s text rendering compare with that of HTML5? Read on to find out!
WebGL is not ready for prime time. It’s just not available on enough of the browsers people actually use for any mass-market game to seriously target it. But what if everybody used browsers that supported WebGL right now? Would it be competitive then? Today’s article explores that question to find out just what kind of game you could make today to take advantage of HTML5 and WebGL and compares it to the performance you’d see had you gone with Flash’s Stage3D hardware acceleration.
Flash (mostly) won the first bitmap test against HTML5 but was then defeated once rotation and scaling entered the mix. Can Flash make a comeback by leveraging hardware acceleration via Stage3D? Today’s test finds out!
Normal bitmaps can be boring, so many games spice them up by rotating and scaling them for various purposes. Rotated characters can follow the curve of a 2D terrain in a game like Dragon, Fly!. Mario himself can scale up to huge size in New Super Mario Bros.. So today we continue the HTML5 vs. JavaScript series by testing the performance of rotating and scaling bitmaps to better compare the performance across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Will Flash maintain its lead? Read on to find out.