Why is Adobe AIR running on Windows 10 experiencing performance issues?

Hi everyone

At my company, we are using Adobe AIR for quite some time now to create desktop multi touch applications.

When testing our software in Windows 10 preview builds, we encountered issues with multi touch where touch points would get stuck. Luckily, this issue turned out to be a Windows 10 issue and was solved in one of the last preview builds. So the issue was fixed before the official release of Windows 10.

Because we were happy our software worked, we deployed it on some Windows 10 machines.

During the time we have done this, we discovered Adobe AIR is having performance issues while using multiple touch points. We already know Adobe AIR queues touch points when it has to process much information, but this issue has different symptoms.

I researched what could have been the cause of this performance hit. 3 different computers have been used to compare the results. Specs for the computers can be found at the end of this post.

My conclusion is that Adobe AIR is experiencing performance issues running under Windows 10.

Reasons why the problem probably resides in Adobe AIR:

• One of our Unity applications is not having any performance issues. The computer load is more distributed across CPU and GPU within Unity.
• The performance becomes worse the more processor intensive objects are placed on the stage (videos vs images). Example from our Win10 computer: the systems starts lagging when there are a couple of videos and 7 touch points are used to move them around. When doing this with images, everything runs just fine. On a Windows 7 machine, it takes much more touch points before the computer starts lagging.
• The issue started arising from using the latest Intel Nuc computers running Windows 10. Of course these machines already start lagging when using 5 touchpoints regardless of the objects on the stage. So we have tested on a more powerful computer to figure out if the issue is caused by hardware.
  We have a simple AIR test application to see if touch is working. We have a processor intensive 'brush stroke' that can be used to push the machine to its limits and see when it starts to lag. When comparing the old Win7 Nuc with the more powerful Win10 Acer Veriton, they started to lag around the same amount of touch points (15). This is worrying as the Veriton processor is faster, has more cores and is a newer generation processor. If everything would be fine, you would at least expect the Veriton to be able to handle more touch points before starting to lag.
• One of our applications where the issue emerged, places a couple of objects directly on the stage. My first instinct was to look if any of the objects had outrageous specs (e.g. an image that is 8000 x 8000 pixels), but this was not the case. We also have not had any issues with this application before on Windows 7 machines.

I have not created a bug report yet because I want to know if some of you have had the same experience and if any of you might have found a workaround or good practice to boost the performance when it comes to multi-touch within AIR running in Windows 10?

We are using the Adobe AIR 4.0 SDK. We know this is definitely not the latest version, but are not able at the moment to change everything to the latest version because of various dependencies regarding the development of our software.

Computers we have used:

An Intel Nuc

- Windows 7 Pro 64 bits (6.1, build 7601)

- Intel Core i5-3427U @ 1.80GHz 4 CPUs, ~2.3GHz

- 4 GB RAM

- Intel HD Graphics 4000, memory 1760MB

- 30 touch points screen

An Acer Veriton

- Windows 7 Pro 64 bits (6.1, build 7601)

- Intel Core i5-2320 @ 3.00 GHz 4 CPUs, ~3.0GHz

- 4 GB RAM

- AMD Radean HD 6570, memory 3809MB

- 10 touch points screen

An Acer Veriton

- Windows 10 Pro 64 bits (10.0, build 10240)

- Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3,4GHz

- 6GB RAM

- AMD Radeon HD 6570. memory 4850MB

- 64 touch points screen

Yours sincerely,

Jens Wouters