If you don't already know, you can greatly increase RMMV's performance by upgrading NW.js and Pixi. @KillerGin figured this stuff out and posted an extremely helpful tutorial here about a year ago (there's a video and everything). So huge thanks to @KillerGin! I decided that before I did the upgrade for myself, I would create a "stress test" project for RMMV and deploy it, then do the upgrade and deploy it again, which would allow me to compare the the two and get a measurable benchmark for each. I wanted...
If you don't already know, you can greatly increase RMMV's performance by upgrading NW.js and Pixi.
@KillerGin figured this stuff out and posted an extremely helpful tutorial
here about a year ago (there's a video and everything). So huge thanks to
@KillerGin!
I decided that before I did the upgrade for myself, I would create a "stress test" project for RMMV and deploy it, then do the upgrade and deploy it again, which would allow me to compare the the two and get a measurable benchmark for each. I wanted to make the before-and-after deployments available to the community so that others could run it if they want. It would be very interesting to see how well each version performs on different systems.
HOW IT WORKS:
Download the tests
here and unzip. The first test is without upgrades, and the second is with upgrades. First run one and then the other and compare scores.
Basically you just start the "game", press ENTER or SPACE, select "begin test" and let it run. It will cycle through 5 different stress tests, and then automatically start over again. Between each round, it pauses briefly so that you can stop and check performance scores if you want.
The five tests are meant to cover different things that affect RMMV's framerate. Each test is based on a different character from the 70's sitcom
Happy Days, so there's Potsie, Marion, Howard, The Fonz, and Ralph the Mouth. (Pinky Tuscadero is also in there, but she doesn't really do anything, she just likes hanging out with Fonzie.)
All of these tests rely on
Galv's Event Spawner plugin to gradually spawn in more and more events. Whenever the framerate drops below 30 for more than 1/10th of a second, a log is made of how many events were spawned in, and then moves on to the next test. At the end of each round, the scores for each test are averaged together. For me, the averages were pretty stable after about 30-40 rounds, so that's probably a good target to shoot for. Here's what the different tests do:
Potsie: He simply moves around the map and shows an effects animation at semi-random intervals.
Marion: She just displays a new picture every 12 frames. For some reason RMMV is REALLY bad at showing pictures.
Howard: He is the only event that uses a "walking" (or in his case "flying") animation. He is a parallel process, and is also changing the value of a variable and running a conditional branch.
Fonzie and Pinky: They don't really do anything, they just spawn in every 3 frames, so this is mostly testing having a LOT of events on the screen at once.
Ralph the Mouth: Ralph is a parallel process that just does some heavier math stuff and also conditional checks. Similar to Howard, but more complex calculations and much different results.
MY RESULTS
I'm running Windows 7 (I know, I know) with 8 gigs of RAM and an AMD 760k quad core processor, so nothing fancy. The numbers represent averages of how many new events were able to spawn in before the fps dropped below 30.
Before upgrade:
Potsie: 14
Marion: 28
Howard: 209
Fonzie: 680
Ralph: 152
After upgrade:
Potsie: 55
Marion: 35
Howard: 947
Fonzie: 2088
Ralph: 573
Performance increases:
Potsie: 393%
Marion: 125%
Howard: 453%
Fonzie: 307%
Ralph: 377%
So, yeah. This is a very significant performance boost. Not so much with Marion, who was simply displaying a picture, but everything else was 3+ or 4+ times better. So if you haven't performed the upgrade yet, you should seriously consider it. Obviously, you can download my before-and-after "games" and run them to see how much of a difference it makes on your system. I only made it for windows, as I don't have a Mac or Linux.
Also I would be interested to know how other people scored in the tests on their own systems, so if you do run the tests, please post your scores and how many rounds you let it run. To get meaningful results, I suggest around 40 rounds each. It can be a little time consuming, so just start it up and go do something else for a while. The more powerful your system, the longer it will take.
Also, keep in mind that the above results are averages taken from a sample of tests. Individual test scores can vary WILDLY. For whatever reason, RMMV's framerate issues often seem completely random. Even with the upgrade, my FPS will just suddenly bottom out for no apparent reason, so this may not "fix" that problem, but should make it noticeably less frequent (AKA YMMV).
I hope this is useful for anyone interested. Let me know if you have any questions or ideas.
UPDATE: Here's the original project file you can download if you want to see exactly what's going on under the hood, or if you want to make any changes:
Project File
