David Lenaert has shared some really insightful performance tips for Pixel Bender over at his blog Der Schmale. David works in Flash like me, so they’re specific to making Pixel Benders for this environment. Some of his tips include:

  • Only  use 4 channels image inputs if you really need them (transparencies)
  • BitmapData is faster than Vector.<Number> (This one surprised me!)
  • Conditionals are expensive! When using them to try and improve performance, they can actually be slower than just the calculating useless pixels anyway.
  • Offloading outCoord() to a variable doesn’t improve performance (Interesting!)

Thanks David for the good tips!