Would you be willing to add the code for the slower way (using nodes) to the Github repo? I tried to duplicate the slow way and could not replicate a performance issue. I'm probably missing something. (See my fork of the repo at https://github.com/jhlothamer/bullet_spawner_test) I do see a massive difference in the number of objects being created and maintained but, at least on my system, both methods hum along at 144 fps. I would love to figure out what makes our node implementations so different. Thanks!
Viewing post in HowTo: Drawing a metric ton of bullets in Godot comments
Hey! gonna try to look for it, but I'm not sure if I saved that one...
However, Godot's optimization and good enough hardware can definitely run the "slow" version at very high fps, this implementation is more impactful on lower-end hardware.
There's also a possibility that the engine itself made several optimizations under the hood, but I'm not 100% sure about that. Still, for simple bullet hell games a moving node2d may be enough, but when there are a lot of things happening at once on the scene, the lower memory footprint each element has the better~