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Flash / Canvas Comparison
With the canvas being a bit more prevalent and wanting to learn more about this HTML5 thing I decided to port Orion (one of my favorite projects) into JavaScript. I was curious to see the perfomance difference between the Flash Player and the (currently) fastest browser Google Chrome.
Now, I’m no JS expert so please let me know if there are any optimizations I could make but the logic is pretty sound in Flash. Keep in mind I don’t care how fast the page loads up, just how fast it performs afterward.
I also have it separated into two pages to keep the browsers from crashing or taking up too much memory. Also, to prevent crashing both demos auto throttle. As long as they can stay above 29fps they’ll add more particles. If not, it’ll throttle down and remove particles. This is checked every 3 seconds.
Below is the current test results I’ve experienced on my computer here at work. Just from what I’ve been able to experience, the Flash Player performs about 600% faster than Google Chrome. Which makes me wonder when HTML will be able to replace Flash in the interactive realm.
Also something to note, is the memory usage (which you can see in Chrome) is about the same in Canvas or Flash. Which leads me to believe that if people are complaining about performance in Flash now. Wait till people try to do the same thing in JavaScript. Same memory usage, same CPU usage, just slower.
| Browser | Particles | Particles Added Per Render |
|---|---|---|
| Canvas – Firefox 3.6.4 | 14,000 | 600 |
| Canvas – Chrome 6.0.427.0 | 50,000 | 2,100 |
| Canvas – Opera 10.60 Beta | 50,000 | 2,100 |
| Flash 10.0.45.2 | 260,000 | 11,000 |
| Flash 10.0.45.2 Debugger | 150,000 | 6,400 |
| Flash 10.1.53.64 | 270,000 | 11,500 |
| Flash 10.1.53.64 Debugger | 225,000 | 9,500 |
* All results tested with a minimum FPS of 29
Flash (Bitmap) Particle Speed Test
Update June 17
Here are the specs for my work computer as a reference:
MS Windows XP Professional 32-bit SP3
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33GHz
2.0GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 332MHz
256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro (Dell)
78GB Western Digital WDC WD800ADFS-75SLR2 (IDE)
As you can see, nothing terribly impressive.
Another round of small updates
Apparently the last set of updates I did to .minerva, .merlin, .sparta and .whistler broke the auto-update functionality. Please manually update to the latest versions and I apologize for any hassle this may have caused.
Small flurry of updates
With .sparta finally out of the way (it was a big update) I finally had time to address some small changes to the other apps I maintain. So out of the gate is 5 small updates. All of them now (except Aroma) now have a Donate button in the About window which I hope you all take advantage of =D. The rest are just bugs or suggestions from the comments. Enjoy and let me know if there is anything else you’d like to see/change.
.sparta 2 Released!
This has taken quite a while, sorry for ignoring many of the comments on Flashbug or .minerva. With this new release .sparta fully supports CS4 and also CS5 products. Try it out, and if you enjoy it, you’ll notice there is now a donate button in the About window =).
Check out whats new
So these past couple weeks have been a whir of activity. We’ve added two new projects to the blog, so please welcome .whistler and Google Tasks.
.whistler
.whistler is a standalone Flash Player trace viewer. So you finally have a program independent of any browser (Flashbug) that can still display your traces.
Google Tasks
Google Tasks is basically the web app wrapped into an AIR app. For those of you who like to keep it open but not at the expense of keeping the browser open.
.minerva
Also among the happenings, .minerva got a big update recently. It also got a huge bug fix right after it =). The first noticeable change is that it now matches the new theme set by .whistler. Slightly less noticeable is it’s improved parsers which can now (byte for byte) recreate a Shared Object just like the Flash IDE! I also took the liberty to update the JS beautifier code as well.
.merlin
Following in line with .minerva, .merlin got a facelift and now follows suit in the same dark theme. No logic changes took place though.
Flashbug
Finally Flashbug got a huge update to support AMF response data from the servers. 1.5 previously only parsed AMF request data, so now response data has been added. A few more bug fixes have also taken place so it’s reliable again. (or so I hope =p)
Please check out all the new things and post in the comments any ideas or bugs you may have.