Frame rate drop from v3.0.10 to v4.6.1

I am building custom 2D particle engines and using pixi.js at this point as the renderer. I noticed some performance differences between versions. When I updated to v4.6.1 the framerate halved in comparison to v3.0.10. I am running 100k sprites on desktop as my sample set and environment.

I created a minimal sandbox which includes multiple versions of pixi and I simply switch the src to the version. This is not too dissimilar to the bunny mark performance testing tool for pixi. Here is the code:

let width = window.innerWidth;
let height = window.innerHeight;

let renderer = new PIXI.autoDetectRenderer(width, height);
renderer.backgroundColor = 0x000000;
document.body.appendChild(renderer.view);

let stage = PIXI.Container && new PIXI.Container() || PIXI.Stage && new PIXI.Stage();
let rabbitTexture = new PIXI.Texture.fromImage('./../assets/rabbit.png');
let particles = [];
let particleCount = 100000;

function setup() {
    for (let i = 0; i < particleCount; i++) {
        let sprite = new PIXI.Sprite(rabbitTexture);
        sprite.x = Math.random() * window.innerWidth;
        sprite.y = Math.random() * window.innerHeight;
        sprite.alpha = Math.random();
        sprite.scale.set(Math.random() * 3);
        sprite.anchor.set(0.5, 0.5);
        sprite.blendMode = 0;
        sprite.angularVelocity = (Math.random() - 0.5) * 0.1;
        sprite.tint = [0xff0000, 0x00ff00, 0x0000ff][Math.random() * 3 | 0];
        particles.push(sprite);
        stage.addChild(sprite);
    }
}

function update() {
    for (let i = 0, len = particles.length; i < len; i++) {
        let particle = particles[i];
        particle.rotation += 0.1;
    }
}

function render() {
    update();
    renderer.render(stage);
    requestAnimationFrame(render);
}

setup();
render();

This is pretty much as simple as it gets. If there is something I am doing wrong here or perhaps a step I am unaware of, please let me know and I can adjust accordingly. As far as I can tell it is simply the change from version to version.

[ivanpopelyshev]

Because of different balance of CPU/GPU load. I know which parts are slower, and we are fixing them in v5. But in general, if you dont have that many sprites, v4 is faster. Different demos, different balance, different outcome 😃

[finscn]

There is a discuss about the performance of v3 & v4 : https://github.com/pixijs/pixi.js/issues/3557