By Alexey Gavrilov on March 31, 2007

I posted all data I managed to collect on WPF/e vs DHTML vs Flash vs WPF performance test results to Swivel for analysis and visualization. Selected charts are embedded below — enjoy! Thanks to everyone, who posted his results — it made up total of 73 measurements, which I could never do alone. Along with fps itself I used fps / GHz parameter to be able aggregating results from different machines. I realize that Core 2 Duo GHz was not born equal to AMD Duron GHz but it’s better than nothing.

I also realize that making statistics from such a small dataset could be misleading. However aggregated results seems to agree in general with what I observed myself so I guess there is nothing wrong with them.

(Update: “Flex / cached” is the version of the test with cacheAsBitmap option on.)

(Update: “Fedora Core 6..” is Fedora Core 6 with ATI video drivers [fglrx] installed)

I’m done with this experiment for now. I think I learned few interesting things from it:

1. Quite complex animation is very much possible inside the browser nowadays and there are variety of ways to implement it (ie Flash hegemony is over)
2. Firefox is the slowest browser out there, which also consumes massive amounts of RAM (I’m using it anyways… thanks to some addictive plug-ins)
3. Opera is probably the fastest one
4. I like WPF/e (more on that soon)
5. Microsoft is serious about WPF/e — the traffic from Microsoft to these pages was probably 40x bigger than from Adobe and Macromedia combined (I know they are the same company now — but networks are still different). Good for them.
6. Apollo (Flex version) has extremely good performance and it’s faster and lighter than WPF. Unfortunately Adobe is not going to allow deeper integration with native applications, so there is no real competition between WPF and Apollo. Bad for Adobe.
7. Flex performs rather poor under Mac OS X and Linux. Not a big deal (Core 2 Duo is here) but certainly surprising
8. Bitmaps caching helps a lot to improve Flex performance on Windows and makes no difference in Mac OS X
9. The open-source dream desktop of Linux+Firefox is the slowest combination you can get
10. The scattering of results on the same machine is overwhelming. The lowest speed of DHTML test I’ve seen on this laptop was 22 fps in Firefox under Fedora and the highest — 120 fps in Safari under Mac OS X.

(Update: The tests along with the source code are still up at www.bubblemark.com — feel free to try them yourself.)