I think most of the people are concerned how well each technology can perform. Obviously, it’s a difficult question for the fact that “well” is quite subjective. Nevertheless, I still try to create some identical samples and let the user to decide which one is better.
In the sample below, I introduced a new control: FPS Meter, which will display the FPS (frame per second) of the application. To start with the stress test, just click on the application continually and compare their differences.
Comparison
Flash implementation: 45 minutes (Implemented First)
Silverlight implementation: 50 minutes
What’s the difference?
- Stress Test Result [AS3] vs [C#]
Source codes
FPS Meter [Flash 9, AS3] (129.9 KiB, 4,613 hits)
- FPS Meter [Silverlight 2, C#] (139.6 KiB, 4,693 hits)
Flash
Silverlight
Stress Test Result [AS3] vs [C#]
These are my findings when running the applications in my Intel Core 2 Quad CPU (Q6600) @ 2.4GHz Computer.
Flash:
- Initial FPS: 64
- FPS after 50 clicks: 32
- FPS after 100 clicks: 16
- CPU usage after 100 clicks: 45%
Silverlight
- Initial FPS: 62
- FPS after 50 clicks: 60
- FPS after 100 clicks: 36
- CPU usage after 100 clicks: 60%
It seems that Silverlight has a better performance in handling images.
I think your testing result will be different from mine. Feel free to share your findings as well~
September 30th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Hmm…Interesting test. I was using an early Flash 10 Beta in I.E. 7 so tried it out. Here are my results. Seems the Flash 10 is better on FPS but not on CPU but that may also be something system related.
System:
Processor: Dual Core AMD 5600+ 2.79 GHz
Ram: 4GB
OS: XP Pro SP3
Browser: I.E. 7.0
Flash Player 10 Beta 10,0,1,218
Silverlight version 2.0.30523.8
Flash
@ 3 images [Start]
FPS 64.024
CPU 0% - 1%
@ 50 images
FPS 40.5
CPU 85%
@ 100 images
FPS 20.98
CPU 85%
Silverlight
@ 3 images [Start]
FPS 34.00
CPU 3% - 4%
@ 50 images
FPS 33.2
CPU 44%
@ 100 images
FPS 18.5
CPU 70%
October 4th, 2008 at 2:27 am
After 30 to 50 clicks, Flash was still outperforming Silverlight by about 3 frames. I have the latest Flash Player 9 installed (not 10) and use FF3.
Intel Conroe2 Laptop
October 19th, 2008 at 12:52 am
windows xp pro sp 3 with all updates till october 18 2008
silverlight 2 final, adobe 10 final
i am getting this error…using silverligh on ie 7 and firefox 3
“Install Silverlight
The site that you visited was built for an earlier, beta version of Silverlight - not the current one. Please contact the site owner to let them know that they must upgrade to the latest release of Silverlight 2. Let us know if the site is not updated shortly so we can try to assist in upgrading the site to the latest Silverlight technology”
October 21st, 2008 at 5:01 am
ABOVE MENTIONED ERROR NOW FIXED….THANKS
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:06 am
I’m getting identical performance in both implementations. I have Flash 10 installed though, I heard Adobe made substantial performance gains in Flash 10 though, any truth in this? Maybe they’ve now caught up to Silverlight 2?
October 24th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Flash
000 clicks - 99 fps
010 clicks - 94 fps
020 clicks - 55 fps
030 clicks - 38 fps
040 clicks - 26 fps
050 clicks - 19 fps
100 clicks - 07 fps
SilverLight
000 clicks - 93 fps
010 clicks - 90 fps
020 clicks - 47 fps
030 clicks - 40 fps
040 clicks - 32 fps
050 clicks - 24 fps
100 clicks - 09 fps
Flash is better for light loads to moderate loads on my machine.
128 MB ATI Radeon Mobility 1250
October 27th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Silverlight is faster on my machine
vaio sz48G - core2duo NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400
October 28th, 2008 at 4:19 am
Amd 5000+ 3Gb Ram Gf8600GT
Silverlight dont work with Chrome
On ie7 flash work with worst performance but silverlight stuck at 3 clic -_-
October 29th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Anyway Flash version 10 and Silverlight are “BOTH” good.. It depends on the usage of the program and it depends to the person who will used. I know there is a comparison between of the two but for me BOTH are good depending to the usage of the program only.
December 4th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Dell Dimension 9150 3.4 GHz dual core intel process and Vista. GForce 7300 LE graphics card
Flash:
3 image / approx. 63 FPS
10 image / approx. 58 FPS
30 image / approx. 22 FPS
30 image / approx. 11 FPS
SL:
3 images / approx. 98 FPS
10 images / approx. 90 FPS
30 images / approx. 23 FPS
50 images / approx. 11 FPS
December 12th, 2008 at 1:24 am
I note that if both flash and silverlight are visible in IE at the same time (windows XP):-
- flash continues unchanged
- silverlight slows right down (as if flash gets first call on the CPU)
Could be their order on the page.
As soon as flash is hidden, silverlight backup to top speed.
Wierdly for me the number of clicks makes no difference to the fps. Flash was steady at 63 from 0 - 50, Silverlight steady at 90 from 0 - 50
December 18th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Thanks for interesting article
December 18th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Vista x64 sp1, ie7, Intel Core2 Duo (E6750) 2,66 GHz (3 images)
Flash 64 FPS, Silverlight 100 FPS
January 12th, 2009 at 1:46 am
OS X 10.5.6, 2.8 Ghz Intel Core duo
Silverlight is faster with 8 images (85fps vs 50fps) but feels a lot less smooth than flash. It seems to jump, or speed up and slow down.
Flash animation looks silky smooth, silverlight animation (on my Mac) definitely not.
Flash is also more consistent in the frame rate. With 18 images:
Flash : 48 - 55 fps
Silverlight : 45 - 80
March 8th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
”AMD Athol tm 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4800+ 2.51 GHZ, 3.5G ram”
Start… (Flash) Strat… (Silverlight)
65 FPS 94 FPS
10 Click’s 64 10 Clikc’s - 89
20 - 63 20 - 78
30 - 56 30 - 50
40 - 43 40 - 43
50 - 34 50 - 36
100 Clicks - 10 FPS 100 - 28
150 - 5 fps 150 - 8
200!!! - 5 Fps
March 13th, 2009 at 2:25 am
[...] wurde erstmal ein altes Beispiel “Fps Meter“. Eine Implementierung in JavaFx sollte nicht ganz einfach sein. Ich werde mich nach [...]
April 6th, 2009 at 5:02 am
No duh… Silverlight does not have hardware acceleration. Try your ‘test’ with Silverlight3 beta and turn on the magic by turing it on via init params for the html object tag and turn on caching for whatever you want enhanced. I’d be glad to help on this.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:14 am
I think both are not good. I think the performance was ok in the late 90’s but now I think its just embarrasing. Don’t you ever ask yourself why you are playing shooters etc.at 1200px with 60fps but in the web you are happy about 100 pictures with 30 fps on 400px? Try java (not the fx crap) with jogl. 3000 pictures on 60 fps.
June 17th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Thanks for a great blog! Checkout my site if you like. Really a nice design and content you got here…
June 18th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Most people will start using the silverlight app without refreshing the page, causing the flash app to slow down the silverlight one.
August 2nd, 2009 at 1:51 am
I have tried several times and every time silverlight has been faster than flash, I am using windows 7 with silverlight 3, but only have flash player 9 but the silverlight has twice the images and is running at 12 fps, while flash is at 2 fps
September 10th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
weird… win7 latest flash10 and latest sl 3..
50 clicks flash 32 sl 28
100 clicks flash 9,8 sl 8,9
also… the flash animation looks better (less flicker).
September 28th, 2009 at 6:29 am
[...] Terence Tsang created this Carousel application for you stress test the Silverlight performance of your computer. It also included a FPS counter to display the current frame per second index. [...]
September 29th, 2009 at 10:30 am
i got like 96-103 fps up till 21 clicks and then it dropped like 5 fps each click
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:40 am
Flash performs WAY better than Silverlight on my machine.
I stopped at about 100 clicks and Flash was still > 200% the speed of Silverlight
Thanks for this test which learned me not to use Silverlight :)
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:53 am
Right this time, I kept the stats. My results:
Clicks - FPS Fl - FPS SL
0 100 98
1 100 110
2 99 98
3 98 93
4 97 77
5 97 85
6 97 85
7 93 50
8 70 45
9 70 40
10 68 35
20 40 28
30 28 17
40 22 13
50 15 7
60 15 6
70 13 4
80 10 3
90 7 3
100 6 2
110 5 1.5
120 4 1.3
130 3 1.2
140 2.1 1.1
150 2.2 .8
200 1.97 .4
October 17th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Я тоже иногда такое замечал, но как-то раньше не придавал этому никакого значения.
November 24th, 2009 at 6:57 am
[...] picked up one of my previous sample Fps Meter and clone it using JavaFx. To reduce my effort, I started my implementation using the Carousel [...]
December 9th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Great Post! I love to read articles that are informative and beneficial in nature. Thank You for sharing your knowledge.
January 19th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Great Post indeed!
January 20th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Nice one!
January 20th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Cool!
February 8th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
When both are fully visible, silverlight runs way slower after about 20 clicks, around 10 to 20 fps while flash is still at 100. Isolated, flash still gets around 100 and silverlight is around 90!
On with flash!
February 12th, 2010 at 12:20 am
[...] of putting this approach to use in a carousel. There are lots of interesting samples available at shinedraw.com – Flash vs Silverlight Repository. Below is JavaFX port of [...]
March 1st, 2010 at 12:32 am
I’ve got a good performance with both them
flash 10.1 (hardware aceleration)
30 clicks - 95 fps
50 clicks - 48 fps
80 clicks - 24 fps
100 clicks - 15 fps
silverlight 3.0.5
30 clicks - 100 fps
50 clicks - 61 fps
80 clicks - 31 fps
100 clicks - 23 fps
core 2 duo E8400 ~3,0Gz
GeForce 8800gt 512 in SLI (for flash)
‘m thinking how many fps flash would get without the graphic card…
hmm…
April 18th, 2010 at 9:47 am
my result:
i’m use Silverlight 4 RTM and Flash 10.
On Flash after 10 clicks fps down.
example: 50clicks FLASH: 27 Silverlight: 43.
80 clicks Flash: 8 Silvelight: 23.
Silvelight WON!
May 5th, 2010 at 11:30 am
Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz, Vista 64, Firefox 3.6, 100 clicks:
Flash 10.0.45.2: 16 FPS
Silverlight 4.0.50401.0: 36 FPS
The following simple-calculations-heavy test shows much higher difference (300 Silverlight vs 25 Flash):
http://www.3djam.com/roozz/Demo/Speed_demo.aspx
So 36 FPS looks like graphics limitation.
Both tests are quite useless for web-client technologies, although ShineDraw’s is more relevant. Please add JavaScript/HTML test to the list.
May 5th, 2010 at 11:33 am
Correction, in the 3djam’s test Silverlight 4 show only 66, 300 is the result of C++ with roozz plugin.
May 27th, 2010 at 7:28 am
FLASH 10 on LINUX (Ubuntu 8.04) 23 FPS after 50 clicks CPU usage 65%
MOONLIGTH 3.0 on LINUX (Ubuntu 8.04) 9 FPS after 50 clicks CPU usage 75%
CLEAR WINER = FLASH 10
clflush size : 64
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5600 @ 1.83GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 1000.000
cache size : 2048 KB
MemTotal: 2067424 kB
MemFree: 260276 kB
Buffers: 606812 kB
Cached: 483648 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
June 4th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
CPU: Intel COD E4600 2,4 Ghz
Windows XP SP3
4 GB ddr2 800 Mhz
HD4850
——–
Results
Flash:
3 - 95-103 fps
25 clicks - 89 fps
50 clicks - 28 fps
100 clicks - 12 fps CPU usage 81 proc.
Silverlight:
3 - 95 fps
25 clicks - 95-103 fps
50 clicks - 49 fps
100 clicks - 19 fps CPU usage ~95 proc.
July 13th, 2010 at 9:28 am
[...] Flash Silverlight Download [...]
July 17th, 2010 at 11:55 am
I get exactly 60fps on Flash — the refresh frequency of my screen - with Flash, when I don’t scroll the page and hold still for a while. I think this is deliberate because it makes the Flash version look smoother than Silverlight, which runs at 100fps. So more FPS are not always better.
August 18th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Flash 10 - FPS = 60
Silverlight 4 - FPS = 95
August 21st, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Intel Core2Duo @ 2.2GHz, 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS 256MB, newest proprietary driver
Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
Chromium Browser with Flash Plugin 10.1 and Moonlight
Flash:
Initial - 100 FPS
25 Clicks - 28 FPS
50 Clicks - 14 FPS
CPU @ Initial - 62%/35% (Core1/Core2)
CPU @ 25 Clicks - 82%/67%
CPU @ 50 Clicks - 79%/70%
Silverlight (Moonlight):
Initial - 52 FPS
25 Clicks - 14 FPS
50 Clicks - 7 FPS
CPU @ Initial - Approx. 50%/70% (varies greatly over time)
CPU @ 25 Clicks - Constant flux between 25% and 95% alternating on both cores
CPU @ 50 Clicks - Same as 25 Clicks
August 23rd, 2010 at 5:22 pm
I realize this has probably been up for some time, but the code for the Flash can be cleaned up a bit to add better performance. Just assigning an Array as this “blah:Array = []” makes a noticeable difference over “blah:Array = new Array()” when it comes to performance.
Anyways, I can mess with this later since enough has changed since Flash 9 that the code should be updated to reflect the current times.