Here is a very similar effect in canvas: http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-c...
It's so slow.. According to hackermom the 14Mhz Amiga could do this at 25 fps, any idea why this is so slow on modern computers?
This is what Flash can do in 2008
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Of course the real difference is a lot higher as it's not just about the clock rate - an awful lot of improvements were made in areas such as the pipeline, caching, floating-point support etc. so I wouldn't be very surprised if the real performance ratio was higher than 1000.
Floating point ops used to take a while. A 16Mhz Amiga with a floating point co-processor might have had one of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881
Yeah, 16 Mhz ==> 160 KFlops, if you believe wikipedia. Supposedly the i7 has a peak of 79 GFlops. Sure, you can't get all of that performance out (either then, or now), but 79,000,000 / 160 is a bit larger than 143.
You used to measure the number of cycles an integer multiply costed, in the dozens or hundreds. Now it takes 1/4 of a cycle. A factor of 10,000 might be a fairer number
Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#23Here is a very similar effect in canvas: http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-c...
It's so slow.. According to hackermom the 14Mhz Amiga could do this at 25 fps, any idea why this is so slow on modern computers?
It's not slow on modern computers. It's slow on these environments that weren't made to execute code quickly, much less do any pixel manipulation. How many orders of magnitude more instructions is it to set a pixel on an Amiga, versus setting it via JavaScript?
Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#24Here is a very similar effect in canvas: http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-c...
It's so slow.. According to hackermom the 14Mhz Amiga could do this at 25 fps, any idea why this is so slow on modern computers?
Because it's running in canvas? In other words, it's running within abstraction layer upon abstraction layer, with various other abstraction layers involved to help make sense of the fact that there are too many abstraction layers.
The amiga code was probably pretty close to talking to the graphics driver directly. Canvas is cool, but in terms of performance it's never really going to compete with native code, or even with flash for that matter since flash can remove some complexity by only building for a single, predictable, optimized environment.
Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#25Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#26It's just plain displacement mapping. It's a very simple (and old), but versatile technique allowing a large amount of effects to be done. The first time I saw this was in 93 or 94, rendered in real time in 256*256 in 25 fps, on an Amiga running a 14mhz 68020 processor. THAT was impressive to me, but seeing this 15 years later in 15-20 fps in Flash on a 2ghz machine just isn't.
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Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neat. This example is nowhere near as pretty as the Flash examples, but it's interesting that my CPU is barely doing anything even when walking around. In the Flash version my CPU is pegged just sitting there doing nothing.
I am pretty sure if HTML5 implement the same scene as bunker.swf it would hog much much more CPU. http://www.ponticstar.com/projects/burning-words/ Try set the font to 100, and see if it's still as smooth as you thought.
Canvas is by all means a CPU hog and much slower than software-mode Flash.
But hey, Flash is dying, etc
Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#28Here is a very similar effect in canvas: http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-c...
'Similar', but not the same - it's only changing the color and not actually displacing the bitmap. Big difference.
Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so slow.. According to hackermom the 14Mhz Amiga could do this at 25 fps, any idea why this is so slow on modern computers?
Because it's running in canvas? In other words, it's running within abstraction layer upon abstraction layer, with various other abstraction layers involved to help make sense of the fact that there are too many abstraction layers. The amiga code was probably pretty close to talking to the graphics driver directly. Canvas is cool, but in terms of performance it's never really going to compete with native code, or eve…
That's why everyone is embracing GPU powered graphics.
Re: This is what Flash can do in 2008
#30I am not an atomic playboy!
And that was 1993. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8#t=4m40s