Increasing animation "frame interval" and exposing it
Hello everybody,
I just took the time to dive into jQuery.fx code and I discovered that the interval we are using for animations is currently at 13ms which is equivalent to 77fps !if the browser can keep up to this pace!
The problem is that animations involve heavy computation and numerous DOM access, and the browser is often forced to drop some frames.
I've done some research to see how other libraries are dealing with this parameter:
In my tests, it appeared that animations seemed often smoother with a 33ms Interval (<=> 30fps) than with the default value.
I think it could be useful to do more tests on the perceived smoothness of animations depending on this parameter. It could probably be increased to at least 20, and making it possible for developers to modify it would be a great addition to the jQuery API.
Regards,
Louis-Rémi Babé
I just took the time to dive into jQuery.fx code and I discovered that the interval we are using for animations is currently at 13ms which is equivalent to 77fps !if the browser can keep up to this pace!
The problem is that animations involve heavy computation and numerous DOM access, and the browser is often forced to drop some frames.
I've done some research to see how other libraries are dealing with this parameter:
- in YUI3, the interval is 20 by default (<=> 50fps max) and this parameter can be modified by developers
http://github.com/yui/yui3/blob/master/src/anim/js/anim.js#L88 - in scripty2 this parameter is expressed in fps and is 60 by default (<=> 16.6ms Interval) and 20fps for mobile browsers (<=> 50ms Interval). It can also be modified globally by developers
http://github.com/asolove/scripty2/blob/40f0bb04082e2a3b156642f3e34fcbe70944f8f6/src/effects/heartbeat.js#L23 - in dojo the interval is 20 by default (<=> 50fps) and it can be modified
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/dojo/1.4.3/dojo/dojo.xd.js.uncompressed.js (search for 'rate:')
In my tests, it appeared that animations seemed often smoother with a 33ms Interval (<=> 30fps) than with the default value.
I think it could be useful to do more tests on the perceived smoothness of animations depending on this parameter. It could probably be increased to at least 20, and making it possible for developers to modify it would be a great addition to the jQuery API.
Regards,
Louis-Rémi Babé
Topic Participants
lrbabe
Dave Methvin