ActionScript Performance Testing

The way I see it, Flash is currently the standard tool for developing and distributing casual games on the net. While the Flash Player has been making leaps in performance these past years, it still has severe limitations in comparison with modern games on other platforms (e.g. game consoles).

Screenshot from the 1995 racing game Destruction Derby

It seems that the graphics performance is comparable to games that came out in 1995 on the PC, before graphics hardware became widespread. Imagine running a game like Dark Forces or Destruction Derby inside the browser. In a nutshell, on today’s average computer, the Flash graphics performance is Quake 1 tops. Broad statements aside, it is important to know what code flies on the Flash Player when developing games and interactive applications.

I’d like to know what basic code will perform best in a given situation. Therefore, I have started to extract these parts of code from my projects and test them against alternative methods, attempting to quantify the execution speed on the AVM. Unlike Javascript, ActionScript usually runs on the same engine; This makes such specific tests worthwhile.

I have gathered performance tests from a couple of my projects and put them into the ActionScript Performance Wiki. It is open to anonymous editors, so anybody is free to add their own tests.