Performance issue for cursor events on 3d polygon geometry. about globe.gl

[vasturiano]

Thanks for reaching out @knackstedt.

Yes, it is expected that animations on the conic polygons do consume a bit of CPU capacity. The reason is that geometries need to be calculated for all the intermediate positions of the interpolator. These geometries are calculated using three-conic-polygon-geometry and there is some complexity to those objects.

I've optimized what I could in both the geometry lib and in globe.gl, and not certain there's a lot more that can be done other than use it on powerful enough GPU hardware.

[knackstedt]

@vasturiano I can clearly see better performance this way. The fact that you were able to implement a solution so quickly is very impressive :)
It looks very smooth and doesn't make my CPU performance hit 100% at any point during the transition.

[knackstedt]

The system that I'm using for this is very beefy. It's running a Ryzen 9 3900XT and a GeForce RTX 3090.
I feel like there shouldn't be any noticeable lag during transitions. I also notice significant lag on the geometry changes on this scene load https://globe.gl/example/countries-population/, which I suspect has the same origin cause.

A Possible remedy would be enforcing this transition to only apply to a single mesh at a time. It might be better suited as an issue with three-globe instead of globe.gl. I'm not sure I fully understand the differences between the two yet.
If possible you could use scaling to tween between the mesh geometry sizes.

[vasturiano]

@knackstedt I've done some experimenting and ended up with a solution that has better performance during transitions.
It's applied to the latest version and you can see it the example: https://globe.gl/example/countries-population/

Essentially, as you suggested, instead of re-generating geometries at every tick of the tween it's merely applying a scaling factor to the existing geometries.

Let me know if you see an improvement on your side.