By Alexey Gavrilov on March 20, 2007

I used Adobe’s Apollo Alpha 1, which was released today, to package Flex and DHTML versions of my web animation benchmark. The goal was to try the thing in the action and see how its performance compares to Flex and DHTML animation running in the browser.

Apollo is really cool (see screenshot below) and packaging both Flex and DHTML applications with it is very easy.

Here are some performance results (compared with the same code running inside the browser), which I got on Pentium M 1.7 running Windows XP SP2.

Animation performance in frames per second (fps); higher fps means faster performance.

Browser	DHTML	Flex	Flex (caching)
Apollo Alpha 1	98	65	172
IE 6.0	56	61	90
Firefox 2.0.0.1	55	52	60-90*
Opera 9.01	94	50	100

* Unstable

Please note that Flex version of the test was running with transparent window. HTML-based Apollo applications doesn’t support this (just like any other web-browser).

Although Apple WebKit in Apollo scored 98 fps it looked like its real refresh rate is less than 20 fps and it simply skips rendering of most frames. Opera, while showing the same number, feels much smoother.

I also checked memory consumption and while both applications start with ~30Mb RAM usage the growth rate (yes, memory leaks, which is of course fine for alpha) is quite different. Flex-based Apollo app does only ~1.2 Mb/minute while HTML-based makes as much as 10 Mb/minute.

If you have Apollo runtime installed you can try both applications:

Flex-based bubblemark (download source code)
HTML-based bubblemark (download source code)