Video: Measuring Frame Rate Performance

Measuring Frame Rate Performance, the next episode in the gripping and suspenseful series CodeDependent, is now available from Adobe TV.

This show different notions of "frame rates" and performance in Flex applications, how they relate to each other, and ways of measuring them. Frame rates directly affect the perceived performance and smoothness of animations, so it's something near and dear to my geeky animation heart. Measuring performance may not be something you need to do in every (or any) application, but it's good to know what's going on under the hood and how to get more information if you do need it.

I neglected to mention an important detail about 'render' events (thanks, Corey). In Flash applications, if you call updateAfterEvent() to cause a render event (as we do internally in Flex effects when handling Timer events), you actually need to call stage.invalidate()to make sure that the player sends out render notifications. Without the invalidate() call, the player will render, but will not dispatch any render events. In the case of our example application here, we don't have to invalidate() anything to get the render events because the Flex layout system is calling invalidate() for us.

Here's the video:

Here is the demo application:

And here is the source code.

Finally, here's where you can find the CodeDependent videos on iTunes.

Enjoy.