Pygame Comparison

Both Pygame and Arcade are Python libraries for making it easy to create 2D games. Pygame is raster-graphics based. It is very fast at manipulating individual pixels and can run on almost anything. Arcade uses OpenGL. It is very fast at drawing sprites and off-loads functions such as rotation and transparency to the graphics card.

Here are some comparisons between Arcade 2.6 and Pygame 2.0.1:

Library Information

Feature	Arcade	Pygame
Website	https://arcade.academy	https://www.pygame.org
API Docs	API Docs	API Docs
Example code	Arcade Examples	Pygame Examples
License	MIT License	LGPL
Back-end graphics engine	OpenGL 3.3+ and Pyglet	SDL 2
Back-end audio engine	ffmpeg via Pyglet	SDL 2
Example Projects	Games Made With Arcade	Games Made With Pygame

Feature Comparison

Feature	Arcade	Pygame
Drawing primitives support rotation	Yes	No [1]
Sprites support rotation	Yes	No [1]
Sprites support scaling	Yes	No [1]
Sprite image caching [2]	Yes	No
Type Hints	Yes	No
Transparency support	Yes	Must specify transparent colorkey
Camera support	Yes	No
Android support	No	Yes
Raspberry Pi support	No	Yes
Batch drawing	Via GPU	Via Surface [3]
Default Hitbox
Tiled Map Support	Yes	No
Physics engines	Simple, platformer, and PyMunk	None
Event Management	Pyglet-based, write functions to handle events	Write your own event loop. Can get around this by add-ons like Pygame Zero)
View Support	Yes	No
Light Support	Yes	No
GUI Support	Yes	No (or add pygame-gui)
GPU Shader Support	Yes	No
Built-in Resources	Yes	No

Performance Comparison [4]

Feature	Arcade	Pygame
Draw 50,000 stationary sprites	0.001 seconds	0.425 seconds
Move 5,000 sprites	0.010 seconds	0.003 seconds
# sprites program can move + draw before FPS drops below 55	8500	2000
Collision detection 50,000 sprites	0.044 seconds no spatial hashing [5] 0.005 seconds with spatial hashing	0.004 seconds [6]
Draw 5,000 plain rectangles [7]	0.081 seconds	0.008 seconds
Draw 5,000 rotated rectangles [8]	0.081 seconds	0.029 seconds

FPS comparison of programs drawing stationary sprites.

FPS comparison of programs drawing moving sprites.

[1] (1,2,3)

To support rotation and/or scaling, PyGame programs must write the image to a surface, transform the surface, then create a sprite out of the surface. This takes a lot of CPU. Arcade off-loads all these operations to the graphics card.

[2]

When creating a sprite from an image, Pygame will load the image from the disk every time. The user must cache the image with their own code for better performance. Arcade does this automatically.

[3]

A programmer can achieve a similar result by drawing to a surface, then drawing the surface to the screen.

[4]

Performance tests done on an Intel Core i7-9700F with GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Source code for tests available at https://github.com/pythonarcade/performance_tests and more detailed results at https://craven-performance-testing.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index.html

[5]

Polygon hit box, rotation allowed

[6]

Rectangular hit box, no rotation allowed

[7]

Why is Arcade so slow here? With PyGame, most of the drawing is done on the CPU side. Bitmaps are created and manipulated by the CPU. It is pretty fast. With Arcade, most of the drawing happens on the GPU side. Sprites and drawings are batched together, and we just tell the GPU what we want to change. Or better yet, we write a “shader” program that runs completely on the GPU. This is incredibly fast. But if instead a CPU program runs commands to draw individual GPU items one-by-one, both sets of processors wait for a synchronous communication. That is horribly slow. Drawing individual rects and bits like PyGame does, won’t work well at all on Arcade. Use sprites, shaders, or batch-drawing to get fast performance.

[8]

Scaling and rotation must be done by the programmer drawing to a surface, transforming the surface, then blit’ing the surface to the screen. Arcade uses the GPU for these operations and needs no additional code or performance hits.