Archive for February, 2012

Stage3D Draw Calls: Part 2

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Today’s article shows you how to get great performance with a ton of sprites by reducing your Stage3D draw calls. As we saw last time, Stage3D performance is not guaranteed to be good and falls significantly below normal 2D Stage performance even on expensive tasks like scaling and rotating Bitmap objects as well as redraw regions covering the whole stage. Today we’ll show how to overcome those performance problems and beat the tar out of the 2D Stage.

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Stage3D Draw Calls: Part 1

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There’s no doubt that Flash 11’s new Stage3D API can produce some amazing results by giving us access to the power of the user’s video card/GPU. However, it’d be a mistake to blindly assume that it is always faster than the traditional Flash display list (i.e. Stage). Today’s article begins a series that discusses the topic of “draw calls” and how they heavily impact the performance of your application.

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Compression Speed

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Flash makes it very easy to compress data- just call ByteArray.compress. It’s just as easy to uncompress with ByteArray.uncompress. With such convenience, it’s tempting to compress every ByteArray you send across without a second thought. But is this really a good idea? Will compressing every packet you send over a socket slow your app to a standstill? Today’s test is designed to answer just this question. Read on for the test and results!

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Repeatable Random Performance

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A couple of years ago I posted a class that generats pseudo-random numbers in a repeatable way. This is useful for a variety of tasks, but a recent comment reminded me that I hadn’t tested its performance. Today I’ll pit my repeatable random function against the standard Math.random function as well as Skyboy’s repeatable random class. Read on for the results!

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