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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

This really shows me how far removed are interactive experiences in a browser as opposed to running natively in an operating system.

Nothing about this game should tax the resources of a mid-level computer from the late 1990s, yet when running inside of a browser, you'd think you were asking your computer to run Crysis at maximum resolution.

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Not to disagree with your fundamental point -- JavaScript and WebGL has a ways to go yet -- but what computer are you thinking of? 1999 was the year of Quake III, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life, which looked like this[0] with fully-baked maps. This game smoothly renders thousands of dynamic polys with shading and stencil shadows, not to mention anti-aliased typography, at 1440x900 with about 30% CPU on my MBA. It's a little more impressive than you make it sound.

[0] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/89/Quake_III_Aren... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Unreal_tournam... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/SurfaceTension...

Running this in Chrome on Linux on a four year old PC - This ran very smoothly and always stayed below 20% CPU.

This being the top comment, I'm assuming it got upvoted the most, but nobody chimed in verbal agreement.

I'm posting from a 2007 Compaq 8510p with Windows XP, and having the browser bog down as if I've been hacked has been the sharpest reminder of late I need to upgrade.

I don't know what you're using, but I'm using a base model macbook air and the cpu barely took a hit. Very smooth rendering.

My box is very recent but low price, and the game was running smoothly using 5% of the CPU... maybe you're not properly using hardware accelaration?

I'm on a mid 2010 Macbook Pro using Chrome 20 (dev) and it runs perfectly smooth with no lag and no noticeable spike in CPU usage.

Runs ok, on MacBook Pro bought January 2008 (4GB, 17inch). But the fan started running, which is rare (Safari OSX 10.7)

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