Do you take CPU usage into account?

programming flash
#1

Rules for web development include making your files as small as possible, to require less bandwidth and faster loadtimes, but what about CPU usage?

Flash 8 has a bunch of nice features like blur, shadows, glow etc, that have to be rendered at runtime. This takes up quite a bit of CPU usage. Do you guys take this into account when designing a website/animation?

I ask this because I’m working on my portfolio at the time, where a bunch of thumbnails light up with a glow on rollOver. The glow results in a peak of around 55% CPU usage. When I move my mouse pointer fast over the thumbnails, I easely get peaks that get to 100%. Without the glow, it’s about 20% (CPU is about 10% when animations are idle). I’m working on an AMD XP2600+.

Do you guys check your websites on older, slower computers to make sure people with that kind of system are able to see everything as smooth as you do on your monster develoment machine?

Are there tricks to keep the CPU usage as low as possible?

#2

I wouldnt use that many blending effects at once. Generally I’ll output my files to flash 7, while blending options are a nice contribution from adobe to flash animating with them is really taxing for a cpu. If youre going to be having alot of animation on one page its best to use actionScript to accomplish this, all the blending options can be controlled via actionscript.

#3

When i test them on a machine… I always test on a crappy 1.4ghz computer my bro has… bascially if it idels at more than 10cpu your doing something wrong. Yea almost all built in filters lag blur is the most CPU demanding. In general sense if it can be done a different way without a filter do it only use filters if your foced too.

[whisper]my newest site uses 0-2 cpu when its not touched[/whisper]

#4

[quote=Templarian;1985193]When i test them on a machine… I always test on a crappy 1.4ghz computer my bro has… bascially if it idels at more than 10cpu your doing something wrong. Yea almost all built in filters lag blur is the most CPU demanding. In general sense if it can be done a different way without a filter do it only use filters if your foced too.

[whisper]my newest site uses 0-2 cpu when its not touched[/whisper][/quote]

My bad, at the time I tested it my WinTV was on. Looks like that took the 10% off my CPU usage. So I re-checked and it’s indeed 0%-4% when animations are idle.

Guess I’ll just have to lay off the heavy filters :jail:
I already try to do as much animations as possible using the Tween class, instead of using the timeline. That helps a lot in making sure the animations are smooth.

#5

most, if not all, of flash’s blending filters can be re created using tweens with .pngs. Not sure how beneficial this method would be over built in blending options but you dont have to worry about cross compatibility with older ver. of flash player.