Performance-limiting characteristics of Nodes

[Hervé Girod]

I did not look at the presentation, but perhaps the Raspberry Pi itself is one if the key reasons for these performance problems. It is a great but limited device. I'm not taking at face value the claim that the Pi beats last year generation smartphones architecture.

And I'm not sure that canvas would be a suitable tool for "complex" graphic work in JavaFX. It is very limited, I think intentionally. For example you end having a lot of "work" to do even if you want to make a small change to an existing "scene". Nodes are much more powerful.

Hervé

Sent from my iPhone

> On 30 déc. 2013, at 00:15, Felix Bembrick <felix.bembrick at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I just watched the excellent presentation by Gerrit Grunwald "Use the force
> Luke" on Parleys and in it he mentions that one of the key ways to improve
> performance is to limit the number of nodes in the scenegraph.  He also
> mentions that on such devices as the Raspberry Pi the maximum number of
> nodes viable before performance degrades significantly is very, very
> limited.  Further, he then goes on to demonstrate that the equivalent
> visual appearance can be achieved by other means such as CSS, Canvas etc.
> where the number of nodes is much less.
> 
> The implication here is that there is a performance-limiting effect of
> Nodes.  If the device's GPU is capable of rendering certain graphics
> primitives, effects, transitions etc. and JavaFX is capable of "making them
> happen" by one way or another, I am curious as to why the simple presence
> of Nodes limits performance so significantly.
> 
> The obvious conclusion is that Nodes use memory and perhaps the associated
> overhead is the cause but given that we are largely talking about GPU based
> processing I find it hard to believe that it's as simple as this.
> 
> So what is it about the nature of Nodes that causes them to have such a
> limiting effect on performance?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Felix