Awesome library

[David2010]

I wanted to thank all those developers who created the sfml library.

The only problem I had was I couldn't get static libraries to work but even thats not a big deal.

Its wicked fast compared to the other libraries out there.

As a test I made a simple game to demonstrate framerate differences between the different graphic libraries I tested.

These tests were done on a Windows XP box with a really old nvidia video card.

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Python and Pygame = 20 to 30 FPS

C++ and SDL = 30 to 50 FPS

C++ and DirectX = 60 to 100 FPS

C++ and SFML = 800 to 1000 FPS

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I don't understand how SFML could unleash the raw power from my video card while the other libraries I tested couldn't.  I didn't even know my video card could do so much until I found SFML.

On my laptop however I can only get 300 to 400 FPS using SFML but its got an old Intel GMA onboard graphics so thats no surprise.

I will most certainly recommend this library to anyone else who wishes to program games in C++.

[Laurent]

Thanks for the feedback

It would be interesting to have more detailed information about the game you used for these benchmarks. Usually, SFML doesn't perform that well compared to other libraries :lol: (unless you already use SFML 2 beta).

I don't understand how SFML could unleash the raw power from my video card while the other libraries I tested couldn't.

Simple: other libraries are old and not based on hardware acceleration at all, while SFML uses OpenGL under the hood to provide maximum performances.
But as far as I know, both Allegro and SDL (and thus PyGame) are working on that, and should provide hardware accelerated rendering in their next version. It would be interesting to benchmark these versions.

[Silvah]

Simple: other libraries are old and not based on hardware acceleration at all, while SFML uses OpenGL under the hood to provide maximum performances.

So DirectX performance should be similar, unless what OP calls DirectX is DirectDraw, not a properly used Direct3D.

[David2010]

Being as it was reasonably difficult to port the game to DirectX using DirectDraw (Limited knowledge), I didn't really consider it a fair comparison. Yet I added it anyways.....

I used SFML version "1.6".

I made a simple pong game and ported it over to those platforms.

It took roughly 6 hours to create and an hour to port. The exception being with DirectX as its structure is way different.

My original intent was not to provide a 100% accurate comparison but to get an idea of the differences in performance.

I am well aware of the flaws in thinking this would be even close to a fair comparison.

The purpose of this thread was basically just to thank the developers.

I would have just removed that part but I didn't want to create a stub of a thread.