Performance

inkgd is overall slow. The high number of allocations that ink requires makes GDScript choke.

For instance, loading The Intercept will create about 30,000 objects. ipsuminious 12 —a generated story based on The Intercept that contains about 90,000 words and 4,000 choices— will create a whopping 360,000 objects.

GDScript struggles to keep the performances at acceptable levels when allocating such a large number of objects, making the creation of stories the major bottleneck.

There’s also a significant memory footprint. ipsuminious 12 takes about 250 MB of RAM.

Benchmarks

The time required to create and allocate a story is benchmarked below.

All benchmarks use variations of ipsuminious, a story based on the Intercept, which can replicate itself to artificially increase the number of words and constructs. The growth is linear. Size 12 is 12 times bigger than size 1.

ipsuminious doesn’t reflect real-world conditions, but should still give you a rough idea of the time budget you need to consider.

Size 1

About the size of The Intercept.

Statistics

Bytecode

Words

Knots

Stitches

Functions

Choices

Gathers

Diverts

120 KB

7,650

34

30

3

340

95

230
Performances

CPU

OS

Time

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (3.80 GHz)

Windows 11

600 milliseconds

Apple M1 (3.20 GHz)

macOS Monterey

360 milliseconds

Intel i5-6267U (2.90 GHz)

macOS Monterey

1.52 seconds

Apple A14 Bionic

iOS 15

430 milliseconds

Apple A9

iOS 13

2.57 seconds

Size 6

Statistics

Bytecode

Words

Knots

Stitches

Functions

Choices

Gathers

Diverts

714 KB

45,900

199

180

18

2040

570

1370
Performances

CPU

OS

Time

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (3.80 GHz)

Windows 11

3.32 seconds

Apple M1 (3.20 GHz)

macOS Monterey

2.12 seconds

Intel i5-6267U (2.90 GHz)

macOS Monterey

8.91 seconds

Apple A14 Bionic

iOS 15

2.80 seconds

Apple A9

iOS 13

42.65 seconds

Size 12

Average novels contain about 90,000 words.

Statistics

Bytecode

Words

Knots

Stitches

Functions

Choices

Gathers

Diverts

1.4 MB

91,800

397

360

36

4,080

1,140

2,738
Performances

CPU

OS

Time

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (3.80 GHz)

Windows 11

6.65 seconds

Apple M1 (3.20 GHz)

macOS Monterey

4.42 seconds

Intel i5-6267U (2.90 GHz)

macOS Monterey

17.64 seconds

Apple A14 Bionic

iOS 15

6.10 seconds

Apple A9

iOS 13

1 minute 44 seconds

Alternatives to inkgd

If vanilla inkgd proves too slow for your needs, there are two options involving Godot Mono.

  1. use the (undocumented) compatibility layer of inkgd, that exposes the official C# implementation while keeping the same API;

  2. use the official C# implementation through godot-ink.