More on Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Animation Performance
I was concerned about the performance of Silverlight animation as uncovered in my balloons example. I did a couple more tests on my own PC.
- Running as is with balloons and clouds: iexplore.exe uses about 65-75% CPU on my P4 PC (99% on my wife's AMD laptop)
- Removing the balloons and balloon creation loop, leaving only the fixed xaml-based cloud animation: about 55% CPU usage
- Removing all animation: about 5% CPU
That shows that the animation is definitely very CPU intensive, more so than other platforms. Remember, this is all Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (not even a beta), so I would fully expect it to change before release. Don't make production decisions based on alpha information. I'm posting this here just as an FYI for other Silverlight developers.
You can download the source for the balloons example from the referenced blog post.