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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Datapoint: demo is VERY slow on Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 + Chromium 66.0. Startup took more than a minute, and then it proceeds with what feels like 1-2 fps.

More info: 8GB of RAM, motherboard graphics (no GPU), Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU G1610 @ 2.60GHz.

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Yes, I'm running current chrome on current macOS with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6gb vram) and 16gb ddr3. CPU utilization is 75% on all four cores and when drag-scrolling around the map I don't get more than 10fps. EDIT: I measured it with the developer tools. The performance is not significantly different with them open. I have a feeling you'll never be able to solve this without going to webgl because canvas drawing is slow af. I highly recommend checking out Three.JS. I wouldn't be surprised if you could port the entire game to using it in a week or so.

Canvas drawing is fast on platforms where it's hardware accelerated, which has been the case on things like iOS Safari for years now. At least in the past it was also beneficial to make a few optimisations such as drawing to integer pixel coordinates, avoiding special paths for subpixel rendering.

How does Safari compare? For me it's butter smooth and no fan whir on a 3+ year old mbp.

Ill test this soon.

Holy shit Safari is a smooth 60fps with around 5% cpu load. The differences are really shocking.

Thanks for the heads-up! We'll look into that configuration

High CPU overhead seems reasonable for HTML5-based games. Introducing a DOM can only make things slower relative to a leaner (native) engine.

For reference, I'm on a late-2015 laptop (XPS 13 9350) with integrated graphics, but the newer i3 gives me perfectly fine performance.

Canvas doesn't have a DOM, for what it's worth.

Oh, duh.

Still, javascript.

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