Love2D-Benchmarks

This are a few benchmarks for testing the pure performance of Love2D. I implemented a naive approach first and then tried to optimize it.

Useful optimizations(I found so far):

• Use SpriteBatches
• Don't clear that SpriteBatch. Just set the sprites positions(10-20% more performance)
• Use locals: see Circle Physics setObjects method in the optimized version and non-optimized one
• Set friction of your physic-objects to 1(if not otherwise needed) to improve physics performance(15%)

How-To

For automatic testing you can run the testSuite.sh like this:

# run all benchmarks 5 times
./testSuite

# for 4 iterations per benchmark or as this 
./testSuite 4

# for 2 iterations of the Circle Physics benchmark.  
./testSuite.sh 2 Circle\ Physics/main.lua 

After that you get the result in your console with calculated average, minimum and maximum as well as every result of every iteration.

Benchmarking

• Every benchmark runs for a fixed time(8 seconds by default) and counts every rendered frame
• After running a benchmark it prints the final score to your terminal

You can tweak the benchmark by setting the objectCount in the code, change the running time or tweaking the physics engine.

Results

Love 11.1, i5-6260U CPU @ 1.80GHz, Mesa 17.3.8 DRI Intel(R) Iris Graphics 540 (Skylake GT3e), Debian(testing) GNU/Linux Kernel 4.15

Benchmark	n	Average	Minimum	Maximum	Time(sec)	Object Count
Circle Physics	5	103941	75725	172992	8	2000
Circle Physics Optimized	5	135635	96290	180845	8	2000
Nested Object Logic	5	142336	137918	148621	8	25000
Nested Object Logic Optimized	5	162441	159457	165195	8	25000
Huge Tilemap	5	5389719	5354886	5511811	32	512x512
Huge Tilemap Optimized	5	5305393	5204595	5584530	32	512x512
Huge Tilemap Experimental	5	4506699	4329579	4779127	32	512x512

Love 11.1, Raspberry Pi 3, Mesa 13, Raspbian GNU/Linux Kernel 4.14.34

Benchmark	n	Average	Minimum	Maximum	Time(sec)	Object Count
Circle Physics	5	29899	28952	30704	8	500
Circle Physics Optimized	5	39698	36644	46011	8	500
Nested Object Logic	5	26848	24132	28590	8	5000
Nested Object Logic Optimized	5	22156	20615	23936	8	5000

Project

I will add some more benchmarks every now and then and will write down every optimization I found.

I am open for any contribution and information on improving my benchmarks as well as suggestions what should be implemented.

Background

I came from using the godot engine to use Love2D as I found many bottlenecks in the performance of godot. Some while ago I developed a small prototype 2D-game which had alle functionality I wanted but came to the point where the performance of godot wasn't good enough. As I targeted a Raspberry Pi 3 performance was crucial. But even on my development machine I had quite a few frame drops. Maybe I will add the same benchmarks implemented in godot later on.