I just watched the excellent presentation by Gerrit Grunwald "Use the force Luke" on Parleys and in it he mentions that one of the key ways to improve performance is to limit the number of nodes in the scenegraph. He also mentions that on such devices as the Raspberry Pi the maximum number of nodes viable before performance degrades significantly is very, very limited. Further, he then goes on to demonstrate that the equivalent visual appearance can be achieved by other means such as CSS, Canvas etc. where the number of nodes is much less.
The implication here is that there is a performance-limiting effect of Nodes. If the device's GPU is capable of rendering certain graphics primitives, effects, transitions etc. and JavaFX is capable of "making them happen" by one way or another, I am curious as to why the simple presence of Nodes limits performance so significantly. The obvious conclusion is that Nodes use memory and perhaps the associated overhead is the cause but given that we are largely talking about GPU based processing I find it hard to believe that it's as simple as this. So what is it about the nature of Nodes that causes them to have such a limiting effect on performance? Cheers, Felix
