I haven’t been able to work on my portfolio for a loooooooong time. One of the reasons is that I want to generate and display a slew of new algorithms and works I’ve worked on in the past 2-3 years. Recently, I’ve been in love with Particle Systems and although Flash’s 2D was great from the beginning, thanks to the Bitmap class, the introduction of 2D GPU accelerated API has hit the ball out of the park. I’ve tested ND2D, Starling, Genome2D etc and I personally adore ND2D alot. It’s sad to see that the project is now obsolete. I’ve noticed that Adobe tries to advertise Starling a lot but Starling lacks the general API usage ease that many other recent APIs have learned to improve. Nevertheless, Starling still packs a punch in performance.
The credit for this snow goes to Tim Soret. This is a very gpu heavy demo and the storm one can really slow your browser down, so be warned. I’ve compiled it using three better known Molehill 2D GPU libraries. Nd2D, Starling and Genome2D. Feel free to add your thoughts/benchmarks in the comments below.
Genome2D: Outstanding performance, tedious API, lacks general purpose texture filtering (I guess this was recently introduced).
Starling: Excellent performance, vast support for GPU accelerated API including extensions, filters for sprites and buttons. However, differentiating between the old Flash API and starling is tedious.
ND2D: Now defunct still packs a punch but has poor support for sprites and buttons etc.
Without further ado:
Related posts: