Tip #8 in my Top 10 Performance Tips For 2012 was to reduce static accesses of variables, functions, etc. in favor of non-static variables and, especially, local variables. I neglected to reference one of my articles and it was pointed out to me that I hadn’t actually written such an article! So today I’ll elaborate on my tip and show why you should prefer non-static and local variables so you can find out just why it deserves its place as a top tip.
Posts Tagged performance
It’s a new year and it’s time to make some New Years resolutions for Flash performance. Today’s article is a collection of what i consider 10 top tips for improving the performance of your Flash apps. Read on for the list!
Flash 11’s new Stage3D class introduces a whole new kind of bytecode to Flash: AGAL. Today I’m beginning a series of articles to talk about what AGAL is in the first place, how you can generate its bytecode and, more generally, how these wacky shaders work. Read on for the first article in the series and learn the basics of AGAL.
One frequent request I get on my AS3 vs. JavaScript series is to test AS3 in more environments. Today I’m doing just that and testing its performance in browsers (plugin and ActiveX control) and standalone/projector mode across Mac OS and Windows operating systems. Does it make any difference? Read on to find out!
It’s been about 8 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.
Flash Player 11’s new Stage3D hardware-accelerated graphics API not only allows you to write shaders (custom code to position vertices and color pixels), it downright requires you to do so. To get the lowest level access (and therefore most power) out of your shaders, you write them in an assembly language called AGAL. Read on for a test app that compares the speed of these shader instructions, the fundamental building blocks of all Stage3D apps.
Since Flash Player 11’s new Stage3D allows us to utilize hardware-acceleration for 3D graphics, that entails a whole new set of performance we need to consider. Today’s article discusses the performance of uploading data from system memory (RAM) to video memory (VRAM), such as when you upload textures, vertex buffers, and index buffers. Is it faster to upload to one type rather than another? Is it faster to upload from a Vector, a ByteArray, or a BitmapData? Is there a significant speedup when using software rendering so that VRAM is the same as RAM? Find out the answers to all of these questions below.
Flash 11’s new Stage3D enables us to make amazing 3D games and applications in Flash. It also burdens us with two forms of memory: the system memory (RAM) we’re used to and the video card’s memory (VRAM) that stores objects like textures, buffers, and shaders. In order to not use more VRAM than the player’s video card has, we must know how much VRAM they have. Unfortunately, the Stage3D API does not provide us with this information. Today’s article provides a workaround function that allows you to quickly test your players’ VRAM. UPDATED to fix some bugs in the test
Flash 11’s new Stage3D API gives us hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, which is a major jump forward for Flash-based games and simulations. Along with this comes some added responsibility: we must now care about our users’ graphics cards. Today’s article features a simple benchmarking application that you can run to get a basic idea of how Stage3D is performing on a certain computer. Read on for the benchmarking app!
At long last, Flash Player 11 has been released and carries with it a raft of exciting new features. Perhaps most exciting is the inclusion of the new Stage3D class (and related libraries) to enable GPU-accelerated graphics rendering. Today’s article will be the first to cover this new API and discusses one of its features: reading back the rendered scene into a BitmapData that you can put on the regular Stage. Surely this will be a popular operation for merging 3D and 2D, so let’s see how fast it is!