AIR vs. Unity3D. Who’s faster? (Update 1)

Update 1: uploaded some sources (look at the end of article).

Hey there!
Yeah, it’s been a while blahblahblah.. To the point! =)

Sometimes I’ll highlight actual files from the archive, attached at the page bottom.

Sometimes I see Flash developers interested in the Unity3D lately, and I – one of them actually)
I work with Unity for a while already and all I can say – it’s fantastic experience! So cool to learn C# language (I hope other Flash devs make wise decision to code in C# as well), to learn new community and people, to meet a lot of new challenges and to look at 3D world from a new point at all!

Many Flash developers are still uncertain they should try Unity and spend their time learning this brand new world though.. And in some cases it’s built on top of the AIR and Unity3D performance differences obscurity. So I’ll unveil portion of this differences in this article to help those Flash developers make a choice (whatever what they choose)!

All examples I’ll compile with AIR 3.6 and Unity3D 4.1 and I’ll try to keep similar functionality and look of these examples to let them compete.
I’ll test builds on the pretty slow Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and make some tests on the desktop as well.

Intro

Okay, let’s start from comparing empty builds.
To measure FPS in unity3D I’ll use hand-made FPSmeter working with GUIText.
In AIR builds I’ll use different FPSmeters, usually in-built to the frameworks I’ll use.
Well, let’s see to the built apks (I built Captive Runtime in AIR and usual release build in Unity3D):
Continue reading

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