Rive performance degrades with large canvas size – Is This Normal?

Hey community

I’m having a weird encounter regarding the performance when I implement a Rive animation on my website. Maybe someone can help me here.

The goal:

I am trying to implement a large rive animation on my project (with the new Rive element) and currently I am trying to fix performance issues.
At the end the animation should fill the whole screen and the user can scroll sideways. The animation consists of a background image and 20 animations that are triggered when hovering over them.

Now, in the process of fixing performance issues I deleted almost all the objects in rive so I can test it better. In rive, my test file looks like this:

You can see that the artboard is still large, but I deleted all but two of the objects/animations.

The problem:

Now I had the weird encounter that when I crop the rive canvas on my website to the size of my browser window, the performance is just fine:

But when I dont crop it and let the user scroll sideways, the performance is much worse:

What I think is weird is that the part of the canvas that is either hidden or visible has no object or animation on it. Its just a blank space.

Is this normal?

Can anyone confirm if this is normal with rive animations? And is there a way to go around this problem?

And: Do you have tips on how to optimize performance when implementing large rive animations on websites?

Links to the two sites:

My read-only link:
Rive – 2 Animations: CROPPED