Why are the games in jMonkeyEngine's showcase so low fps? Is this typical?

The monthly WIP screenshot thread, various youtube videos (Including one from 5 years ago released by jMonkeyEngine themselves), all have examples of sub-60 fps games that aren’t exactly high fidelity.

Is this a problem with the engine itself, really poor programming practices, or is it that half the people using it seem to have awful hardware?

On a related note - how is LibGDX’s 3d support now days? I tried going through their showcase again but it’s almost exclusively really bad 2d mobile games.

Is it the games or just the videos that have low fps? Their rigs might have trouble rendering and recording at the same time.

It’s still a bit of a shot-self-in-foot sort of advert though…

Cas :slight_smile:

LibGDXs 3d support is a solid base but in a vanilla state not enough to reach the same level of performance and richness of the 2d api, you cannot really go beyond basic materials/graphics and mediocre performance without shaders and your own model handling (merging/instancing) to lower draw calls.

All Java stuff is now competing directly in features and performance with Unity. So that’s the minimum expectation now for indie development…

Cas :slight_smile:

You have to consider what you are finding on sites like this one…

I’m reasonably sure that most people who frequent this forum are hobbyist / amateur programmers working solo or in small teams, what they are going to produce, particularly while learning is not going to be at the same level as the AAA game studios are going to produce.

I can’t really speak for jmonkey, but for libgdx, it happens that there are several studios using libgdx to make professional games… but they are working in teams and don’t really require the type of help that they are likely to find on a forum like this… and it happens that libgdx promotes all games submitted equally because they want to promote the little guys work in the same way as the pros.

My main concern is that some of the low FPS was shown in an official trailer, and several comments talking about low FPS in the official demos - you’d think they’d put their best foot forward.

maybe one of these:

  • slow computer (maybe old gpu, slow cpu)
  • bad recording software/hardware
  • bad code optimization
  • unprofessional video encoding/editing

there are a lot of reasons.
while you see games that run like crap with jme3 you can find even more games that run like crap with unity3d…
most of the time because of lack of knowledge and very poor optimization.