Freeciv As Benchmark of HTML5 Canvas Javascript Performance 246
Andreas(R) writes "The Freeciv.net crew has benchmarked their web client, which is a rich web application using the HTML5 canvas element. This shows how fast Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer perform using the latest HTML5 web standards."
Re:Drop IE8 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Opera? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Drop IE8 (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't seen an alternative browser that it works reliably on yet. Yes, its a windows specific thing, but until other browsers properly support single sign on you're not going to get them into the corporate workplace in any fully supported manner. And if they're not at work, they're less likely to end up getting installed at home, either.
I mean, i'm an admin and run plenty of different browsers, but from a "please why won't the users leave me alone" perspective, properly patched IE plus any half competent malware protection (corporate firewall, managed AV solution, etc) IE on the corporate desktop wins.
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Opera? (Score:4, Interesting)
A year ago I experimented with HTML5, and made (you guessed it) a Tetris clone, which took advantage of Canvas elements.
I noted that when drawing entire images, it was all very fast. Drawing a frame took about 12ms in Firefox and Opera. (limited by the precision of the timer)
Then I tried combining all the images into one, and drawing a region from the tileset. Talk about slowdown! Wow! Separate 64x64 images blitted fast, but as soon as it was dealing with a 512x512 image, the time to render jumped to about 500ms.
I did some quick pixel math and concluded both Opera and Firefox must've been making a copy of the entire tileset every time I tried to blit a region from it. It's the only thing that added up. When I boosted the size to 1024x1024, it jumped to over 2000ms for a frame. Completely ridiculous! ;)
Perhaps someone else could chime in about whether this bug has been fixed? Note: I was blitting from Image elements to Canvas elements. Canvas to Canvas always worked fine for me.
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:3, Interesting)
Man, I should have read the article. FTFA:
Note that the implementation for Internet Explorer 8 does not use the HTML5 canvas element, because this isn't supported. Freeciv.net implements a canvas-replacement using DHTML and divs with clipped background-images. Therefore the test results are not directly comparable with the other web browsers.
That's what I get for not reading the article :-(
Re:Not fast (Score:5, Interesting)
And I believe the trend will be for consumer CPUs to aim for lower heat and power, rather than higher speed. Unfortunately, the abstraction layers just keep piling on there.
Give it another few years, and we might not be able to emulate Commodore 64 games on the desktop any more.
Re:bias (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the biggest reasons in the apparent jump in performance from Vista to Win7 was MS fixing the ungodly GDI problem that Vista had - there's a fairly thorough write-up about it here http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx [msdn.com]
Essentially, GDI in Vista scaled in a square/cube fashion with each new object taking up memory in both system and graphics memory - a double whammy for any machine with integrated graphics which hammered the memory bus and, if you didn't have enough memory, your swap file as well. Cue loads of machines slowing to a crawl with the usual excuse that they're "not powerful enough" for Vista. This was untrue - we had a couple of Vista workstations at work (needed 64bit) with 8GB RAM and if you open enough windows you'll still exhaust your memory.
Thankfully they fixed this for Win 7 and you can now boot in on a machine with 1GB of RAM and run it quite comfortably; the minimum I've managed to get Vista to run nicely in is 1.5GB with some tweaking (this was a friends laptop that was sold with vista and... 512MB of RAM, the poor lass. Took 15minutes to bot).
Executive summary: Vista was a bloated piece of crap.
Posting anon cos I've already modded this thread.
Re:Drop IE8 (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the difference between ideal approach and pragmatic real-world approach.
Vendor A offers IE6 support only (back when it was IE6 or Netscape) and meets 90% of the requirements out of the box; Vendor B offers IE6 and Netscape support but only meets 60% of the requirements out of the box. Since nobody has Netscape installed it's a complete no-brainer to buy from Vendor A, even though you get browser lock-in as a result.
The entire point of web apps in a business environment isn't the ease of replacing the browser, it's the ease of replacing the version of the software being rendered by the browser, and not having to install a separate client for each system - you install one browser once and everything uses it.
The knee-jerk overreaction was merely highlighting that people don't make bad decisions on purpose. They make complex decisions with a lot of compromises and browser support is merely another compromise.
Even if you do mandate multi-browser support, the IE6 based system requires IE6, Netscape or Lynx (as its chosen browsers). You still haven't got IE8, Firefox or iPhone/Safari support because they just didn't exist back then. It's pretty harsh calling someone an idiot for buying a system that doesn't support technology that doesn't exist.
Re:Coherence? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's a question of scalability, which is often more important than raw speed. With some systems, they perform well in relatively restricted hardware, but the performance improvement when you add more does not scale linearly with the extra RAM, CPU, and so on. With others, you get more constant overhead, but better scalability. Think of the overall performance as constant overhead + scalability load * resources. With XP, it sounds like the constant overhead is lower (which makes sense, as it had to run on 200MHz chips), but the scalability load is higher (which also makes sense, because it wasn't designed for 4+ cores and 2+GB of RAM).
Or, to put it another way, if XP gets 80% of the maximum theoretical performance out of a 200MHz Pentium with 128MB of RAM, but only 50% of the maximum theoretical performance from a 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, while Vista gets 50% and 70%, respectively, what the grandparent said would be true and contain no contradictions.
Various things in modern operating systems are optimised to take advantage of lots of spare RAM (for example, aggressive pre-fetching of data from the disk). Splitting services up into concurrent tasks has more overhead from context switching, but lets you scale better to multiple processors. Older desktop operating systems treated RAM as a very scarce resource and were heavily optimised for the single-CPU case, because hardly anyone had more than one CPU.
FreeCiv vs Civ4 (Score:3, Interesting)
I started playing Civ4 last week for a couple of games -- it runs very well in Wine, incidently -- and I'm wondering how FreeCiv compares. Obviously the graphics aren't there, but after a couple of games that seems less and less important. The gameplay mechanics are what matters, and I think they work very very well in Civ4. And is the AI any good? Wikipedia seems to imply that diplomacy is a bit simple.
Anybody got "in-depth" experience with both games?
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:3, Interesting)
For instance, the Sun Java SSV Helper plugin for IE tends to cause a lot of the problems that you are describing including taking 3-4 seconds to open new tabs at times. I have no idea exactly what the Java SSV Helper plugin does but I have yet to encounter a Java applet that won't run without it, so I just disable it.
I have also seen the Adobe PDF Link Helper plugin cause problems (although the latest version of Adobe Reader 9 appears to have fixed most of those problems.)
Try starting Internet Explorer using the No Add-Ons shortcut and see if you still have problems. If performance is improved then you can launch IE the normal way and go to Manage Add-Ons and try disabling add-ons one by one until you find the ones that are causing problems.
Re:Not fast (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the abstraction layers just keep piling on there.
Well, to be fair, they're just re-writing software the way it should have been done in the first place, but couldn't originally due to the hardware's limited capabilities.
Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score:3, Interesting)
No, they're living in 2010 with a 60% market share.
Unless HTML5 outperforms Flash it's not likely to be the reason for anybody to switch. Anybody who hates MS or Flash has already switched, right?