Papervision3D

The public release of Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1 is VERY EXCITING NEWS for Papervision3D.

The new features have a dramatic effect on performance, taking advantage of the latest developments in CPU design.

Hardware scaling allows us to go full screen, without increasing our render size and a very cool transition as a bonus. On the other hand, mip mapping improves the quality of our textures while drawing them faster.

But the feature I’m most excited about is multi core support, particularly in the vector rasterizer.

On a typical Papervision3D AS3 scene, the 3D calculations take around 30% of the time, while the remaining 70% is needed for the player to actually draw what we are rendering.

Since this process is our most significant performance bottleneck, splitting the work between the available CPUs makes a whole lot of difference.

On a single core machine I’ve benchmarked a 25% speed increase, which is already pretty good. But things get much better with multiple CPUs.

I’ve measured an amazing 80% performance gain on dual core and I’m looking forward testing a quad core machine

For this test, I’m rendering 3000 polys, in 3 planes of 800×600 screen size. Since the texture has that same resolution, no mip mapping is needed.

Numbers are average milliseconds per frame. The time spent by the engine doing the 3D calculations is indicated as PV3D, while SWF is the total time per frame. The results show that the player’s render overhead is cut by half when running on the dual core.

Flash Player 9.0		r45		r60
Centrino		25		24		PV3D
		96		77		SWF
Centrino Duo		25		24		PV3D
		96		53		SWF

Performance was measured on single and dual core Centrino laptops running Firefox (with Alessandro Crugnola‘s very useful Flash Switcher extension) under Windows.

This release opens new possibilities for high performance Flash. I personally can’t wait to start playing with it.

A big THANK YOU to the the Flash Player team for pushing the boundaries of our 3D playground. For more info about the new features, check out the blog of Flash Player engineer Tinic Uro.

This entry was posted on June 14, 2007 at 8:40 pm and is filed under CS3, Links, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.