Web developer Chris Black has been benchmarking an iPod touch 4G and a Nexus one to find out how each performed when running the same animation in HTML5 – the web’s latest and greatest standard. The results may interest you…
The HTML test on the iPod, which has the same guts as an iPhone 4 sans 3G radio, ran at a choppy 22fps. The same test on the now discontinued Nexus One yielded a less choppy but not exactly fluid, 40fps.
This is noteworthy in itself, but Black went on. The next test was to try the same animation – a bouncing ball – on the Nexus One running Adobe’s latest Flash release (10.1). This gave the best results of all – a mouth-watering 57fps. That’s just 3 frames short of the magical 60fps that gamers strive for. Just to rub salt into the wounds, the Flash test also happened to use around half as much battery power!
There seems to be some debate about the benchmarks used, and Black has posted an update to his original post:
Hey everyone, thought I might chime in as the author of the blog post being criticized. The code was engineered to be as equal as possible between the two demos. Full source has been provided to show this. The code posted by wolever is not scalable but raises some interesting points. The physical dimensions of the canvas being rendered does matter. Scaling the demo down to 300x300px yields 40fps on the iPod Touch. I’ll be doing an updated blog post on this tomorrow showing results at different sizes. I’m not sure why anybody thinks canvas is limited to 24fps. My post tomorrow that wrong. And no, I don’t work for Adobe. I complain about Adobe almost as much as Apple and I much prefer running my own company at the moment. You might find this post a bit more interesting, http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2010/09/19/css3-excels-on-ios-but-lacks-on-android/
All very interesting, and it will be interesting to see what results and conclusions can be gleamed from further testing. When you remember how strongly Apple CEO Steve Jobs has gone after Adobe’s Flash in the past, these tests get even more interesting!
