Optimizing your Away3D application can be the difference between a slow and frustrating or rewarding experience for the end user. In this chapter, we looked at how the performance of an Away3D application can be easily monitored using the included Stats class. A number of techniques were then presented that can be employed to trade off visual accuracy with performance, such as reducing the stage quality, using filters to reduce the number of elements that are rendered to the screen, reducing the resolution of the rendered output, and reducing the screen area that is drawn to.

A sample application was presented that demonstrated how offscreen rendering can be used to create detailed scenes that would not be possible to create with standard 3D objects alone.

The LODObject class was covered, which can be used to increase performance by rendering lower detail 3D models when further back in the scene.

Finally, we saw how the various 3D model formats supported by Away3D can affect an application's loading performance.