Hey, There is a big difference in animation/effect performance across computers in Flex. On our macs (Mac Pro desktop, Macbook Pro, MacBook), everything is fairly smooth (Firefox and Safari). On any Windows XP (Firefox or IE), alpha and translation animations/effects are very choppy, not to mention rotation or anything more complex: a TweenMax alpha tween from 1 to 0 in 1 second only uses 3-4 frames, instead of 24-60. On Windows Vista, it's like 2 frames (this is on a Panel 500 x 500). Same with tweening x and y. Same with running Andrew Trice's KeyFrame and MotionPath example, very choppy on anything but a mac, especially if you have a full blown application with 50+ components on the stage at once. I think this might have something to do with the event dispatching going on with animating properties. When you tween the "alpha" on a UIComponent for 1 second, it can dispatch more than 20 "alphaChanged" events, even when there are no listeners for it. Add in a position animation, and you easily have 50+ events being dispatched for every item animating on the screen, plus calls to invalidateProperties(), invalidateDisplayList(), etc. (setting UIComponent.suspendBackgroundProcessing to 'true' doesn't help), plus all the background binding execution flex generates in the background. Tons of things pure Actionscript doesn't use when animating. In pure Flash/Actionscript, when you do animations (like those found on Template Monster website templates), they are VERY smooth, even on Windows Vista. The only difference between these animations and those in Flex is: 1) Flash is not dispatching any events when properties change. 2) Flash is not calling any invalidation methods when properties change. Granted, invalidation and binding is core to Flex and I love it dearly. But if there was/is a way to prevent any binding updates (event dispatching), and calls to even any invalidation methods WHILE ANIMATIONS ARE RUNNING, I think animations in Flex would be just as smooth as those in Flash and pure Actionscript, on all computers. Question is, is this possible? Is it possible to say "don't update any bindings on these objects until this animation is complete"? If not, is Ely or others involved in the new Spark architecture willing to take on such a task? Otherwise it's pointless to use anything but the simplest animations (changing alpha or color on a 20x20 ButtonSkin) because its choppiness will just detract from the User Experience. Thanks for your help. Lance
