Flash performance on the Wii

Here's a startling observation: the Flash Player on the Wii appears to run better than the one on my MacBook Pro (2.16 Core Duo). At least for this simple test SWF.

With the movie's frame rate set to 60 fps, I'm getting frame rates in the range of 41-52 FPS on my notebook (FireFox). Under Safari, the average rates are higher (49-52 FPS). On Windows, under Parallels, I'm getting 39-42 FPS for FireFox, 38-41 on Opera and a pretty steady 50 FPS on IE (49-51 FPS).

On the Wii? The darn thing is staring at me at 61 FPS at the moment! :)

Now, here's the craziest thing: In the sample SWf, if I move the cursor to the top-left corner of the screen, the frame rate drops to about 34 FPS.

What can cause such a drop in frame rate?

Not having tested with another SWF, I don't know whether this behavior is a quirk of the player or the specific test SWF. If it's the latter, could it mean that Math.sin() and Math.atan2() -- which are used in the enterFrame loop that updates the position and orientation of the arrow pointer -- are somehow more computationally intensive with smaller numbers? Needless to say, I can't observe this same behavior on my Mac.

Granted, this is a very simple example but it looks like the Flash player's performance on the Wii isn't that bad at all.

Have you done any performance tests for the Flash Player on the Wii? Feel free to share your observations in the comments.

See also: Flashing the Nintendo Wii.

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