As a response to Ralph Hauwert’s article I created a little example of what can be achieved using plain ActionScript 3 syntax. Ralph has put up a great example of how you can wire things like Alchemy, ActionScript and PixelBender together to achieve an astonishing result.

However I asked myself if it is possible to achieve the same result without making use of Alchemy, PixelBender or bytecode manipulation. I asked the guys sitting with me in the office to compare the results and they were unfortunately very different on various machines. Sometimes my version is faster, sometimes the version from Ralph is faster and sometimes they are about the same.

Now there are some very important things to note here and I am surprised that I got so close. Since Ralph is making use of PixelBender the number crunching is done on multiple cores. Something that is not possible with the ActionScript version which is the real bottleneck. And there is another big difference. Ralph’s calculations are done in 32bit while I am using 64bit precision. Therefore I am happy with the result and it shows that using pure ActionScript is still a good choice.

In order to optimize the code I used a linked list for the particles and minimized the comparisons between different data types. Here is the result.