Back to the bomberman
rzwitserloot posted in me, tech on May 20th, 2006
Apparently my forays into bomberman last time I was at the mediamatics building in Amsterdam for an unconference made some sort of impression.
There are some Firefox dev guys here along with an Opera employee, and it turns out bomberman makes for an excellent speed test. Only safari manages the full 50 FPS that bomberman tries to run at.
There isa debug build of bomberman available here. The number in the top box should be between 40 and 50 for a full speed bomberman. Any less and you’re in trouble.
Current standings, measured when 1 bomberman is running, a bomb is pulsing, and one explosion is going off, all measured on my iBook G4 1.333 Ghz (50 is max):
safari 2.0.3: 44
firefox 1.5.0.3: 15
firefox 1.6a1 (Deer Park Alpha 2): 18
opera 9 preview 1: 36
Note that at least in firefox (either version), the addition of the FPS counter and the debug boxes SIGNIFICANTLY slows down the whole thing, whereas Safari doesn’t skip a beat. This is really strange, because the purely DHTML (non-Canvas) based gfx demos like the one I reported on earlier (here) is notably faster in firefox.
May 20th, 2006 at 8:30
The Mac builds are significantly slower than windows; this probably won’t be fixed on the trunk for a while (there’s a bunch of prereq work that needs to happen). Windows builds are much faster — on my laptop, with the CPU locked down to 800MHz, I never see below 35fps or so using a debug build of Bon Echo (Fx2 alpha2).
You may want to retry your tests with the latest builds of both Fx2 alpha2 and Fx from the trunk, and see how it goes; anything calling itself Deer Park Alpha 2 is pretty old at this point.
May 20th, 2006 at 8:31
Forgot to mention.. Cool game!
May 20th, 2006 at 12:57
AMD AthlonXP 2500+, firefox 1.5.0.3:
Both walking: ~30
Doin’ nothing: 40-50
“Neither Mozilla, Firefox nor IE perform very well on Mac, being generally slower than on other operating systems.”; http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
May 20th, 2006 at 13:50
That’s really good to hear. One of the reasons I’m building bomberman is for it to serve as a bit of a showcase: There are alternatives to flash.
Something that runs with half-assed speed obviously wouldn’t make for a very godo argument. Both Gandalf and Anne (Of Firefox and Opera) reacted almost shocked when I confronted them with the low speeds. Hence I’m not very worried, especially now that there’s something like this out to test with. Apparently you guys care a great deal