Looks nice but runs at awfully slow 4-5 fps on my Ubuntu 64bit system. Is Radeon HD 4200 to weak for WebGL or is there something you need to configure?
Sounds about right. I get up to 11 fps on Ubuntu 64bit on an AMD E-350/Radeon HD 6310 system fullscreen on 1366x768 with the catalyst drivers and hidden GUI and a quick search for benchmarks seems to indicate that it is about twice as fast as the HD 4200 ( http://www.notebookcheck.com/ATI-Radeon-HD-4200.20492.0.html ). You may get a few fps by switching to the proprietary drivers if you do not yet use them, but I wouldn't expect wonders.
[Edit:] And I see up to 13 fps if I fly away from the sun, the author seems to be right when he writes "Calculating sun visibility the geometric way (by casting rays through the terrain and the clouds) can be expensive if not done carefully."
A retina display has to render 4x the pixels of a regular display, so the slowdown isn't too surprising. Same reason why drawing operations were actually faster on the iPhone 3GS than the 4 after the latter came out.
I played with it more and the UI windows seem to make a huge difference, with them all open it drops to around ~25-30fps or so. I probably had only a couple open to get the original 40fps number. With all the windows closed on the air it actually gets right up to 60 fps. I'm leaving everything at the default settings, enabling 'flying mode' and just leaving it flying straight.
I also tried it on my 'mac' desktop with is an i7 920 @ 4.1Ghz with a nvidia 660Ti running OSX, also using chrome and with all windows open it only does ~40-45fps but pegs at 60fps again with them closed.
Resolution probably makes a big difference also, on both machines I have the chrome window 'maximized' but the desktop has 1920 x 1200 monitors vs the air's 1440 x 900 screen. I'm not sure how webgl handles retina resolutions, it's also possible the nvidia gpu isn't kicking in for some reason, assuming your on the 15" rmbp.
Runs well on my machine (32-bit Ubuntu, NVidia drivers, Firefox). You shouldn't need to configure anything for it to be fast in general (if it's blacklisted, it won't run at all), but non-NVidia drivers on Linux can be slower in some cases. Do other WebGL demos run ok for you?
Gentoo 64-bit here, Radeon HD 4350 and managed to get 20-30 fps depending. (git versions of Mesa, libdrm, xf86-video-ati, and a recent kernel, all of which are probably required to get best HW rendering, unfortunately).
60 FPS here, Ubuntu 64, nVidia GTX 660. Cool demo, thanks. For most people though I doubt they will have good video hardware so I think 3D in the browser is still several years of for the everyday user.
[Edit:] And I see up to 13 fps if I fly away from the sun, the author seems to be right when he writes "Calculating sun visibility the geometric way (by casting rays through the terrain and the clouds) can be expensive if not done carefully."