While checking out Grant Skinner’s new tweening engine, gTween, I was bothered by one small phrase…
gTween is a small (4.5kb), fast (1500 instances, 0.5s duration, ~25fps), instance based tweening class, with a huge number of options and capabilities.
The definition of ‘fast’ in terms of Flash Player performance is somewhat of a mystery. We’re looking for high frame rate i guess? Lots of things on stage? Total time of operations? But frame rate and number of instances don’t really tell the whole story. There are a number of factors that make the Flash Player performance a very difficult thing to measure.
- Flash Player performance varies based on the speed of the viewer’s computer.
That’s nothing new. All apps deal with this. However, Flash Player has these added complications.
- Flash Player performance varies based on what version of the player is being used.
- Flash Player performance varies based on the browser in which it is embedded.
- The browsers’ Flash Player runs at a different speed as desktop versions (browsers seem to have a speed cap around 50 or 60 fps while stand alone versions do not)
- Loading times for external assets must sometimes be taken into account.
- Framerates can vary based on the set framerate of the Flash app. Rumored ‘magic framerates’ may affect this as well.
- Flash Player can sometimes hang, crash, or self-destruct if too many processes are going on at once.
- Flash Player 10′s support for video hardware should complicate things further (although it will probably make our lives easier in the long run).
The results of our latest benchmark