Rendering diagnostics not working in AIR 2.6

Question

I'm trying to move my pfi application over to AIR 2.6 and am experiencing a huge drop in frame rate.  I worked quite hard to make sure everything was cached with the GPU when working with pfi and found the rendering diagnostics to be invaluable in helping me nail down areas where the graphics weren't being cached properly.  I thought I would check to make sure that the graphics are still being cached in AIR 2.6 but when I built the application with the flag enabled, the rendering diagnostics didn't turn on.  The flag is CTTextureUploadTracking and is part of the application xml:
<InfoAdditions>
<![CDATA[
<key>UIStatusBarStyle</key>
<string>UIStatusBarStyleBlackOpaque</string>
<key>UIRequiresPersistentWiFi</key>
<string>NO</string>
<key>UIDeviceFamily</key>
<array>
<string>1</string>
<string>2</string>
</array>
<key>CTTextureUploadTracking</key>
<true/>
]]>
</InfoAdditions>
I also tried adding the -renderingdiagnostics flag to the command line as indicated in http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/packagerforiphone/packagerforiphone_devguide.pdf but I get an error telling me that "The -renderingdiagnostics flag is no longer supported".  Does anyone know how to enable this now?

Answer 1

If Adobe ever wants developers to properly utilize the GPU then a tool like rendering diagnostics needs to exist.  Flash has a terrible stigma of being a processor hog, slow and glitchy.  Flash doesn't need to be like this but lots and lots of sloppy coding have helped this become what people perceive as reality.  Even if 2.7 is leaps and bounds above 2.6, if no one can properly figure out how to keep data cached with the gpu then Flash apps will still be slow, battery hogs.  A visual troubleshooting tool for gpu caching problems is really essential.  If it hadn't been for that I would never have been able to figure out some of the bizarre quirks in caching.  For instance, if you have an opaque background in a Sprite and you add something to it as a child, the gpu will never be able to cache either of them correctly.  Why? I don't know, it doesn't make sense but the rendering diagnostics helped me find the problem quickly.  Please add this tool or something like it back in.  You're doing your devs a serious disservice and, consequently, helping push the idea that Flash is a technology that is no longer relevant.