Along with Flash Player 11′s new Stage3D class have come hardware-accelerated 2D rendering engines. Impressive results have already been demonstrated by advanced engines like Starling and ND2D. Today’s article shows a simple Stage3D-based sprite class to help learn more about how these engines are implemented and provides a simplified alternative to the more complex 2D engines that still delivers hardware-accelerated performance.
Posts Tagged texture
Simple 2D With Stage3D
Jan 23
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.
Stage3D Upload Speed Tester
Oct 31
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.
Stage3D VRAM Tester
Oct 24
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
