Is frameloop="demand" with react-spring the most performant way to animate?

[ashleymvanduzer]

Was just looking at the docs a bit, trying to wrap my head around how to use frameloop="demand", and noticed it mentioned that "If you use react-spring to animate your scene then it will also take care of it.", in regard to (as far as I understand it) triggering frames manually with the invalidate function. Does this mean that using spring is more performant than other methods of animating? and if so, does this mean if you set frameloop="demand" and use spring, it will call the invalidate function behind the scenes whenever an animation needs to be rendered? I have asked a somewhat related question in the past, but thought this question was unique enough to start a new discussion.

[drcmda]

react-spring will invalidate when it must render. frameloop=demand generally means that threejs only renders when it must. this is less about performance and more about saving battery. something like lerp or damp for sure is more performant than a spring.

[ashleymvanduzer]

Thanks for the explanation. I don't understand why this wouldn't be super performant. I thought having a gameloop / renderloop was one of the most expensive parts of threeJS and so if you can only do that when you have to you'd see a huge performance gains. Like the example sandbox in the docs that shows the sphere with orbitControls that renders at 0fps when not using controls / when at standstill.

[gsimone]

performance is a huge net, you can think of frame performance ( the time it takes to draw a frame, which leads to FPS ), power performance (how much drain, battery duration), thread blocking etc.

If you want to minimize power and overall resources consumption you need to render less times (and less things).
If you want to minimize the time it takes to render one frame (to optimize for FPS) lerp is sure to be executed in less time than spring calculations.

[ashleymvanduzer]

@gsimone Thanks for taking the time! I think my statement above kind of began to diverge from the original question I posted, in the sense that I was a bit confused as to Paul saying frameloop=demand is less about performance, rather than wondering why spring wouldn't be more performant than lerp (lerp vs spring in terms of performance makes sense to me). Sorry for any confusion there.