In my comparisons the animation in a Flash movieclip is usually much more fluid than animation in Flex yet I can't figure out why. Does Flex snap to pixel values while animating? If so is this something that's part of the Animate classes we can fix? The last time I looked into it we were using Number not int but that might have been Flex 3.
I found this short video <http://www.paulirish.com/2012/why-moving-elements-with-translate-is-better-than-posabs-topleft/> on how using translate in HTML is better than animating the top / left values. In the video the object that is animated using the top and left is updated by stepping from pixel to pixel on the CPU while the object that uses translate uses subpixel images on the GPU. If it's a case of simply using GPU mode instead of auto, which IIUC auto almost always chooses CPU, then are there any downsides to switching to GPU? Or is there something we can change in the Flash Player to animate on subpixels? The alternative is that Flex invalidation architecture is causing some issues but I have no proof. I'm guessing there might be syncing issues the way the refresh rate on a monitor that is different than the framerate of an animation causes issues. But the difference in Starling animations (all GPU?) and movieclips from Flash (CPU) both seem much more smooth than Flex animation. Another alternative is that Flex is trying to do too much. If you have a container that has 50 elements in it and then you use animate the height from 0 to 100 or the other way around, each element is actually getting invalidated. Then, the question would be is there a way to turn off invalidation while resizing and just do something like resize of a bitmap snapshot. FYI Sorry if we had this discussion before but I can't find how to search the mailing lists.
