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Comment by alokedesai | Hacker News Reader

Good question! We did an initial benchmark of scrolling back in July against Terminal, iTerm, Hyper, Kitty, and Alacritty, if you’re interested: https://www.warp.dev/blog/how-warp-works.

We started by forking Alacritty's model and parser and because we have a similar architecture (Rust-based, rendered on the GPU) we should generally be at, or near, the performance of Alacritty.

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I just ran a quick test using Casey Muratori's termbench (https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench) you are an order of magnitude slower than Alacritty, and also significantly slower than iTerm. Warp also locks up pretty severely and only shows a new frame once every few seconds during most of the run.

Alacritty

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz

VT support: no

ManyLine: 1.5670s (0.0399gb/s)

LongLine: 1.1261s (0.0555gb/s)

FGPerChar: 0.3293s (0.0551gb/s)

FGBGPerChar: 0.6598s (0.0534gb/s)

TermMarkV2 Small: 3.6822s (0.0484gb/s)

iTerm

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz

VT support: no

ManyLine: 13.2968s (0.0047gb/s)

LongLine: 3.6535s (0.0171gb/s)

FGPerChar: 1.8944s (0.0096gb/s)

FGBGPerChar: 2.8304s (0.0125gb/s)

TermMarkV2 Small: 21.6750s (0.0082gb/s)

Warp

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz

VT support: no

ManyLine: 9.6199s (0.0065gb/s)

LongLine: 8.3727s (0.0075gb/s)

FGPerChar: 8.1124s (0.0022gb/s)

FGBGPerChar: 6.0873s (0.0058gb/s)

TermMarkV2 Small: 32.1924s (0.0055gb/s)

Yeah, this is a known issue, unfortunately--but it's definitely something we want to fix as we improve Warp. See more information here where we chat with Casey about it: https://twitter.com/zachlloydtweets/status/14175482714432348...

> we should generally be at, or near, the performance of Alacritty

> evidence that it’s not

> Yeah, this is a known issue

I don’t want to be critical, but which is it? If you know you are not anywhere near the performance, why say you are?

> If you know you are not anywhere near the performance, why say you are?

(in a voice like Jon Lovitz as Master Thespian) Marketing!

I don’t see the contradiction. They should be, but they aren’t.

Hey - that's a good point. The thing about terminal benchmarks is that there are many of them, each focusing on a different aspect and producing different results. There's one by alacritty team[1] that we used in our initial tests[2], there's another ones mentioned in the comments above etc. When using vtbench, Warp performed much better than iterm, for example.

Ideally we'd ace all of them, but we're not there yet. Anecdotally, many of our users mention speed/performance improvements over other terminal apps a lot in our Discord!

[1] https://github.com/alacritty/vtebench [2] https://www.warp.dev/blog/how-warp-works

I've tried one very basic terminal rendering benchmark I had at hand [1] and on my MacBook Pro it was 17x faster than iterm and 3x faster than wezterm which is my daily driver.

https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/192

So it's not all that bad ;)

thanks for posting this—no idea why every new terminal released today doesn't test against termbench and/or take a look at refterm these days, that's the first thing I would do.

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