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I'm planning on writing a game, which will use a lot of sprites and images. At first I tried EaselJS but playing some other canvas-based games I realized it's not that fast. And when I saw BananaBread by Mozilla I thought "if WebGL can do 3D so fast, then it can do 2D even faster". So I moved to three.js (using planes and transparent textures, texture offset for sprites).
The question is: is it better? Faster? Most of the WebGL games are 3D so should I use canvas 2D context for 2D and WebGL for 3D? I've also noticed that there are no libraries for WebGL in 2D (except WebGL-2d, but it's quite low level).
Please note that compatibility is not my greatest concern as I'm not planning on releasing anything anytime soon :) .
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WebGL is faster and it has more capabilities.
Talking of the speed factor, Canvas slows down to its components. WebGL is greater than Canvas in terms of speed. Generally preferred for 2D rendering and works related. More preferred for 3d though it can also work on 2D.
WebGL ContextHTML5 Canvas is also used to write WebGL applications. To create a WebGL rendering context on the canvas element, you should pass the string experimental-webgl, instead of 2d to the canvas. getContext() method. Some browsers support only 'webgl'.
WebGL is blindingly fast and fully utilizes hardware acceleration, making it suitable for games or complex visualizations. Although other options can benefit from hardware acceleration, WebGL is written with performance in mind and should perform better than other options in many cases.
The short answer is yes. WebGL can be quite a bit more efficient if you use it well. A naive implementation will either yield no benefit or perform worse, so if you're not already familiar with the OpenGL API you may want to stick to canvas for the time being.
A few more detailed notes: WebGL can draw textured quads (sprites) very very fast, but if you need more advanced 2D drawing features such as path tracing you'll want to stick to a 2D canvas as implementing those types of algorithms in WebGL is non-trivial. The nature of your game also makes a difference in your choice. If you only have a few moving items on screen at a time Canvas will be fairly fast and reasonably simple. If you're redrawing the entire scene every frame, however, WebGL is better suited to that type of render loop.
My recommendation? If you're just learning both, start with Canvas2D and make your game work with that. Abstract your drawing in a simple manner, such as having a DrawPlayer function rather than ctx.drawImage(playerSprite, ....), and when you reach a point where the game is either functioning and you want it to run faster or the game design dictates that you MUST use a faster drawing method, create an alterate rendering backend for all those abstract functions with WebGL. This gives you the advantages of not getting hung up on rendering tech earlier on (which is ALWAYS a mistake!), let's you focus on gameplay, and if you end up implementing both methods you have a great fallback for non-WebGL browsers like Internet Explorer. Chances are you won't really need the increased speed for a while anyway.
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