Does the Flash Text Engine display faster than typical TextFields?

3
votes

In this SO post they have recommended using the Flash Text Engine (FTE) text objects like TextLine and TextBlock for read-only text. They said its faster than using the typical TextField class. However in a speedtest, you can clearly see that TextFields render faster than their FTE counterparts. Why is this? In which case does FTE text objects perform better than TextFields? Of course the FTE text objects look prettier since they have better anti-aliasing, but they are rendering slower.

See the speedtests here:

I'm just creating 500 text objects and repositioning them all per frame. This is what I'm doing, in pseudo code. Its literally a 10 line program so there can be nothing "wrong" with the code.

at init
    500 times
        create FTE/TF object and store in array

per frame (enterFrame event)
    per text object
        increment .x and .y position, wrapped within stage
3
performanceactionscript-3flashtexttextfield
The SO post you linked to says FTE has less memory usage and better rendering - there is no mention of speed. – weltraumpirat

3 Answers

3
votes

Absolutely not true. There is no case where FTE is faster than TextField. FTE attempts to render text more nicely and have more features than TextField. This, in turn, makes it slower. A lot slower.

I spent half a year writing a TLF clone. I could never get past the bad FTE performance or bugs.

3
votes

From my experience regular TextFields are much faster than FTE text

2
votes

That post is quoting these Adobe docs.

It says that FTE:

...offers low memory usage and better rendering.

It doesn't say "faster" rendering, it says "better" -- which I take to mean better quality.