Javafx 2d text rendering speed up

Question

Hello Guys,

I am a little surprised that JavaFX do consume my CPU by showing simple floating text on a screen.

My question is there any option tweaks to turn on hardware acceleration for nodes like Text? To Use GPU and not CPU when rendering 2D primitives?

Here is the simple example that consume up to 40% cpu on my 2.53Mhz core 2 duo + Nvidia 9600M GT. OS: Mac Os X. JavaFX 1.2; JRE 1.5

Edit: I put animation in the example to just simulate text scrolling. You can try and achieve the same CPU consuming by scrolling ListBox or some picture with no stopping.

package text2dacceleration;

import javafx.stage.Stage;

import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.layout.VBox;
import javafx.scene.transform.Transform;
import javafx.scene.text.Text;
import javafx.animation.*;

def longLine = for (i in [1..45]) "{i}";
def textNodes = for (i in [1..64]) Text{content: "{longLine} line number {i}"};
var yoffset = 0.0;

Timeline {
   repeatCount: Timeline.INDEFINITE
   autoReverse: true
   keyFrames: [
      KeyFrame { time: 0s values: [yoffset => 0.0]}
      KeyFrame { time: 1s values: [yoffset => 10.0]}]
}.play();

Stage {
    title: "Text nodes"
    width: 800
    height: 600
    resizable: false
    scene: Scene {
       content: [
         VBox {
            content: textNodes
            transforms: bind Transform.translate(0, yoffset);
         }]}}

Answer 1

Have you played with Timeline's framerate variable? Lowering that might help.

(The framerate description: The maximum framerate at which this animation will run, in frames per second.)

Probably won't have an impact but KeyFrame has a "canSkip" option.

Answer 2

Sun did a lot of work on this starting at 1.5 and through 6 but I don't know how much of it filtered through to Apple's JRE implementation. For comparison is it possible for you to update to a newer JRE such as 1.6? If you can't run the latest version of OSX and therefore can't do you have a Windows machine available on boot camp or whatever it might be worth trying one of the later Sun reference ones to see how you get on.

It might also be worth a post to the JavaFX forum - http://forums.sun.com/forum.jspa?forumID=932

Sun are usually pretty good at responding to these.

Answer 3

VBox { cache: true content: textNodes transforms: bind Transform.translate(0, yoffset); ...

--

cache: A performance hint to the system to indicate that this Node should be cached as a bitmap.