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HTML5 Performance Testing
Hey Folks.
I got several reports of my LD game running slow. I did my own benchmarking across several systems, and well, I can’t tell if we have different opinions of “slow” or if there’s an actual issue. So, it’s time for science!
If you could, fire up the game then press the 2 key to enable the FPS counter. Let me know what FPS you’re averaging, on what browser, and if you know it some specs of your PC (CPU, GPU mainly).
http://www.sykhronics.com/nook/ (or vote here </shamelessplug>)
Thanks!
EDIT: New 60 FPS version without “floating camera”. Apparently I’m the only one that likes floating cameras.
http://sykhronics.com/nook/60/
Also, in this version audio is broken in Chrome, but perfect without delay in Firefox.
EDIT2: New 30 FPS version which is secretly the 60 FPS version, but locked at 30.
http://sykhronics.com/nook/30/
Both versions (60 and 30) include a number of fundamental improvements after I did some profiling, and utilize a different way of Framerate Synchronizing. Chrome, for whatever reason, “totally flips out” as you start the game, but eventually stops complaining and works smoothly.
Looks like a neat game, but I’m at work so I’ll just report my numbers and play later. =p The game starts out at 30fps, but dipped to 25/28 range a couple of times. The graphics and scrolling seemed a little jittery/slow. It’s not much, but it’s noticeable. Could it be that 30 fps is too low for this kind of game? This was on both Firefox 12 and Chrome 18 on win7 64 with an Intel Core i5-2500 @ 3.3Ghz.
I get 30 under firefox 11.0/ubuntu. But! It doesn’t feel very consistent though.. I’d say it sometimes slows down to around 10fps for 3-4 frames every now and then, but without and change in the reported framerate.
27~30 on chrome. It seems as the game is lagging at all times
25-30 average on Firefox. The problem isn’t that much the average than the occasional stutter. It seems smoother on Chrome but it’s displayed really tiny so of course it runs better.
I don’t think it’s a performance problem, I think it’s that the scrolling feels choppy because the pixels are so big and it’s always proportional.
Okay, I made a version of the game that runs at 60 FPS, removes my “floating camera” that everyone hates so much, and some other things. See above.
The ’60fps’ version runs at around 22fps in Firefox 11 on my 2008 Macbook 13″ (Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz) – which runs most Flash and Unity stuff pretty well.
IMHO, HTML5 isn’t ready for gaming yet. Flash may be dying, but there isn’t a viable replacement yet
There’s absolutely no excuse for an ‘Amiga-esque’ lo-res pixel-art game not running at 60fps on a multi-GHz PC, unless it’s simply built on top of bad/unsuitable technology.
Have you looked at using requestAnimationFrame instead of setInterval? It might give you better performance. (http://paulirish.com/2011/requestanimationframe-for-smart-animating/)
Thanks for the link. Yes, this especially made Chrome work better. Thanks for the tip.
I got 29-31fps running in Chrome/Win7 on an AMD Phenom II X4 965 (quad core, 3.4ghz) with 4gig of RAM, Radeon HD 4890 GPU. I saw intermittent long (100-300ms) stalls but additionally the game felt a little sluggish making it difficult to judge the timing for walljumps.
New build(s) are up. Both include the results of some profiling, and a different way of framerate synchronizing. They should run much better, but however Chrome likes to FREAK OUT as it starts, running a crappy framerate for a while, before finally calming down and working properly.
I had 30fps in average but every like 5 seconds it would hang for about 200 milliseconds, making it feel very laggy overall.