[mistercow]

That demo gets about 19 fps on my machine, whereas the WebGL demo appears to be getting close to 60, so that seems to be scaling pretty similarly. Also keep in mind that the demo you linked to uses Alchemy, which is C/C++ compiled to AVM2, so for WebGL to be getting roughly equivalent performance is pretty damned impressive.

[Father]

Actually the 'math' was done using alchemy, the shader was pixelbender http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pixelbender.html However the example was flash then (3 years ago) vs webgl now. This is flash now; a version with 1.4 million particles using the new molehill http://www.simppa.fi/blog/1_point_4_million_particles/

[lloeki]

From the 1.4M page:

"On my OsX toy the difference between flash on browser and standalone is insane. 200 000-300 000 particles is pretty much the maximum until it won’t run smooth anymore. I wonder if this is memory related thing? or what? Who knows? Someone from Adobe might… Well anyways. Here’s the same thing exploding 1.4 million particles in 1920×1200 resolution with smooth 60fps."

Interesting behavior.

On that other JS demo mentioned in a sibling comment my puny 9400m runs at a steady 30fps at 100k with 7~10% CPU on Safari. The same goes for some non-browser pyopencl [0], which uses about 10% CPU. I seem to be hitting a sort of bottleneck here as ramping either up to 200k or using the Flash realtime demo brings FPS down to about the same level. The Flash one though, uses between 20 and 60% CPU and mostly hovers around 30%. Whatever that means.

[0] http://enja.org/2011/03/22/adventures-in-pyopencl-part-2-par...

[mistercow]

Well, that's looking like about 3 fps; it's a lot more particles, but it's also a lot slower, so I don't know how that balances out.