Performance (mainly on mobile devices) about pannellum HOT 7 OPEN

Some improvements were made in bd3990e, but I can't think of or find any other improvements to make for equirectangular or cubic panoramas. On the other hand, there's a lot that still needs to be done for multires.

from pannellum.

For those who are testing with Firefox on Linux, this might be a problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527. For me (Ubuntu 12.04), activating layers.acceleration.force-enabled did not help.

from pannellum.

This is a design problem of pannellum.js and libpannellum.js.

If WebGL is used everything is fine almost but with the fallbacks (probably used most on mobile) there is space to improve.

Due to the many many globals, circum-/crossreferences and closures - especially if using multires types - a refactoring might be an idea.

Using streams like in http://highlandjs.org/ should be considered as well.

from pannellum.

I've only tested Pannellum on desktop and attempted to create a balanced comparison between Pannellum and the commercial KRPano using the same multires tiles, with zoom locked on level 1 and auto-rotate. The result showed a difference of almost 25fps between both, KRPano having the upper hand in the average and maximum fps.

I'll leave these 2 screenshots that show a more detailed view of the tests:

• Pannellum performance test
• KRPano performance test

I'm not sure that it influences much but, as you can see in the screenshots, Pannellum is constantly recalculating the style in comparison to KRPano.

Also, in case it matters, this is the system where I did the tests:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-3470 @ 3.20GHz
• GPU: Intel HD Graphics 2500
• OS: Windows 10.0.10586 (x64)
• Browser: Mozilla Firefox 48.0.2 (x64)

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The "recalculate style" events are from rendering hot spots. At least from my own tests, this is a small fraction of the time.

I'm somewhat surprised at the frame rate, since I often get an average of >50fps on my laptop with an Intel Core i5-4250U @ 1.3GHz (under Linux Mint 17.3).

from pannellum.

On my home machine, which is much better than the one I previously mentioned, I get an average 55fps.
Nevertheless, any idea why Pannellum would perform less than ideal, in comparison with KRPano on that same machine?

Even when dragging around, KRPano would have the smoothness that I am only experiencing with Pannellum on my home computer.

from pannellum.

Performance tends to be a bit hit or miss depending on the device, although I'm not entirely sure why. The only significant issue I've been able to attribute to a specific cause is that frames are sometimes dropped when loading new multires tiles. I'm not sure what to do about this though, since the texture loading needs to happen in the main thread due to how WebGL works. Performance could also be improved by using multiple WebGL texture units, but I don't know if the gains are large enough to be worth the effort.

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