Pixi stress

What you are looking at: phase 1 of 7, mid-measurement. The status line at the top says which phase is running and what frame rate it is holding to. Every star is a sprite being bounced and spun, and the count is still climbing — the run adds about 30% more load every second for as long as the frame rate holds.

How the measurement works

This is not a demo that happens to be busy. It is a procedure:

1. Baseline — a nearly empty screen, to learn the rate the display actually presents at. The target is 90% of that, capped at 54 fps, so a 120 Hz panel is not held to 108.
2. Each phase starts light and grows the load by ~30% per one-second window, for as long as the rate holds the target.
3. Two slow windows in a row at one load end the phase — one slow window is often just the cost of creating the new objects.
4. The result is the largest load that held the target.

A starting load that never holds is halved and the scene rebuilt, so a slow device still produces a number rather than a failure; a 0 means the scene itself is already too much.

The seven phases

Phase	Load unit	What it stresses
bunnymark	sprites	raw sprite throughput
platformer	enemies	tilemap, parallax, tile physics
shooter	bullets	bullet patterns, additive blending
particles	particles	explosion bursts
puzzle	gems	an animated match-3 board
vector	shapes	shapes redrawn every frame
text	texts	canvas text changing every frame

The last two are the interesting ones for this runtime: vector and text hammer the software 2D canvas, which is CPU work, not GPU work.

Why there are two of these

src/stress.js is the same file in pixi-stress and phaser-stress. It owns the load schedule, the measurement and all the game logic that is not the engine’s — the level, the enemy physics, the bullet patterns, the puzzle board. Both engines therefore do identical JavaScript work and differ only in their own rendering, so the two sets of numbers can be compared.

Run it

npm run build:screenkit -w screenkit-example-pixi-stress
runtime/build/macos/screenkit-host --window examples/pixi-stress/app.skpkg

On a Pi, where the numbers are the point:

sh tools/batocera/pi.sh bench pixi-stress   # writes out/pixi-stress.json

Options come from the URL in a browser (?phases=platformer,shooter, ?target=30, ?webgl=2) and from the build otherwise (VITE_PHASES, VITE_TARGET, VITE_WEBGL). Each window logs a line, and the run ends with one result {json}.