JavaFX performance for complex visualisations (original) (raw)

Pedro Duque Vieira pedro.duquevieira at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 16🔞39 PST 2012

Hi,

Just wanted to leave my positive experience with javafx on this subject (performance). I've been porting a previous app that I've also made called Modellus from swing to javafx, it's a free app you can get it here (the official site is down temporarily): http://code.google.com/p/modellus5/downloads/list(current version is 0.2)

The main component - the animator part, is all finished porting to javafx. In general users (with no concrete stats I'd say it has about 2000 - 5000 users) are happy with the performance, only some corner cases where people are using old computers or are creating extremely complex simulations is performance slower than required and slower than the swing version. You can get and test some simulations from here: http://fisicanalixa.blogspot.pt/search/label/Modellus (I'm sorry that the site is in Portuguese but you can use google translate). The videos on that site are from the older version written in swing, but you can download and open the examples on the newer javafx Modellus.

There are some simulations there like the "onda longitudinal" (longitudinal wave) posted on 25 November 2010, that have about 100 objects on screen + a chart + a table with hundreds of lines and performance is still acceptable. All this running on a custom made calculation engine that can respond to user input in real-time allowing the simulations to be interactive.

Note that this is an hobby project of mine that is getting done on my spare time, so only a few hours a week, and also that I haven't done any optimization or been worried about performance. And finally that I know that here and there I can do some simple optimizations and bring it theoretically to a 10x performance improvement.

On a final note I think that IMHBO (In My Humble Biased Opinion) this app is significantly more complex than any of the apps mentioned so far (on this topic) including the port of tower defense that is being done, and still it performs acceptably.

Thanks, cheers.

-- Pedro Duque Vieira

More information about the openjfx-dev mailing list