flash.sampler.getSize() is a handy tool for figuring out how much memory a class instance uses. However, it is often flat-out wrong. Today’s article tries it out on a variety of classes to find out which ones it works on and which ones it doesn’t.
Posts Tagged vertex buffer
Stage3D is hugely powerful, but with that power comes a very new and very complicated requirement for many programmers: shaders. Shaders are tiny programs that run on the GPU and are hugely limited compared to fancy CPU-side languages like AS3. For many programmers new to shaders these things are truly mind-bending. They’re even split into two parts: vertex and fragment shaders. Today’s article focuses on the two kinds of inputs to vertex shaders and seeks to explain them and clear up some of the confusion.
To draw with Flash Player 11’s Stage3D API, you must set up the state of various GPU resources before finally calling drawTriangles. Inevitably, you’ll end up calling drawTriangles multiple times during a single frame to draw your characters, terrain, sky, and so forth. In between these calls you will change the GPU’s state by calling Context3D‘s set* functions. This article will show you which of these functions can literally cut your app’s performance in half.
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.
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.