Optimizing Frame Performance for Mobile Devices
Article Summary
Charles Siebert, Branden Berlin, and Yipeng Song from Oregon State University crashed mobile browsers repeatedly while stress-testing A-Frame VR scenes. What they learned could save your next WebVR project from the same fate.
This Oregon State capstone project systematically benchmarked A-Frame performance on Android devices, testing object models, textures, animations, and lighting across four custom VR environments. The team used Firefox Nightly and WebIDE to track FPS, memory usage, and identify breaking points on the LG Nexus 5X.
Key Takeaways
- Browsers crashed when scenes exceeded 1 million vertices or 70 MB of assets
- Non-power-of-two textures ballooned to 8196x8196, consuming 20 MB per texture
- USB debugging overhead cut performance nearly in half during testing
- 10 max-intensity light sources dropped FPS by 10 frames consistently
- GPU bottleneck confirmed: CPU usage stayed at 10-25% during heavy rendering
Critical Insight
Mobile WebVR has hard limits: keep assets under 70 MB, vertices under 1 million, and use power-of-two textures to avoid catastrophic performance drops.
