As per title, simulator is super slow, so my questions is there any way to improve OpenGL performance in iOS simulator?
The Simulator supports GPU acceleration for Metal starting with iOS 13 on macOS Catalina. OpenGL ES is still software rendered and is likely to remain that way.
I strongly recommend moving to Metal.
Related
SceneKit uses for SCNView in iPhone 6 on simulator OpenGL,
this causes to changing lightning model from PBR to Phong
Error: Physically based lighting model is not supported by the OpenGL
renderer, using Phong instead
Is there a way to fix it?
Newer iPhones render model in SceneKit correctly in PBR
SceneKit uses Metal in the simulator since Xcode 11 running on macOS Catalina. On previous versions of the system only OpenGL was supported.
In Xcode 11, Simulator adds support for Metal development. You can write iOS and tvOS apps that use Metal and test them in the Simulator, gaining the benefits of hardware acceleration on the Mac during development of your app. If you use frameworks built on top of Metal, such as SceneKit, Core Animation, and UIKit, you'll also see better performance when testing your apps in Simulator.
(https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/developing_metal_apps_that_run_in_simulator)
I'm fairly new to developing. My app is graphic heavy with some animation using timers. I am testing on a 4th gen iPad retina. In simulator (Xcode 5) the timers I have going for animations run slower than on the iPad, and some other graphic features (like things fading in and out) don't work the same in simulator as the iPad build. Should I trust the iPad's build and not the simulator? Should I also test on different iPad models to check if the graphic animations run correctly on different models or are they likely to run the same?
I focus on UI art & have experience with making graphics rather than dealing with the Xcode environment itself, so any info about how programmed animation views display on different devices or different environments would be really helpful.
Rule one of developing apps: Always test on a hardware device
The hardware device has a ARM CPU for dealing with normal stuff like calculations and a GPU to accelerate the graphics. The GPU's on iOS devices are pretty powerful and comparable with GPU's of desktop computers a few generations back. Your simulator does not have that and will have problems rendering some of the more heavy stuff because it simulates the device and does not run directly on actual hardware.
I would also suggest that you check out the slowest device possible for the iOS generation you will be targeting in hardware. For instance an iPhone 3GS will still run iOS 6 applications. So if you are targeting iOS 6 or better and it runs well on that device, it will be doing fine on all others in terms of performance.
I am developing iOS app and android app using adobe AIR and Flash CS6.The app contains lots of animations. Since Bitmap images do not give a good quality, I have kept the images in Vector form only. It runs fine on android devices but when I publish it on iOS device many animation lags. How can I solve this without affecting the quality of my animations? I am using AIR SDK version 4.0 and GPU rendering method. Any help would be appreciated.
There might be a few things you could try:
use TweenMax/TweenLite for your animations as the GreenSock library is optimized for performance
try setting cacheAsBitmap to true on the vector you're animating
convert vectors to cached bitmap data (http://esdot.ca/site/2012/fast-rendering-in-air-cached-spritesheets)
try see if using "direct" mode for rendering yields better performance; from what I've experienced GPU is not well suited for vectors
The program I am developing perform relatively well in the Simulator (I have a MBPR/15" with 4xcpu, 16GB Ram&500G SSD) but is awfully slow on my iPad3.
Xcode doesn't show some huge CPU activity and Memory usage stays at ~25MB.
What could cause this problem?
Thanks in advance for any help
Simulator, is a simulator, that means that your application will run with the hardware of your mac, and your mac is pretty on steroids :-) . Simulator behave very differently for the actual devices just few exaple:
sim is case insensitive
sim is not GPU accelerated (games performs better on device)
it lacks some hardware: camera, motion sensors, GPS
To check why your app is performing slow on iPad you have a lot of tools in instruments.
Time Profile
Allocations
Core animation performance
You've got also some tools on the simulator, like checking blending, not aligned pixels, off screen rendering... thay can make difference in general graphic performace
I'm currently working on an OpenGL ES 1.1 app for the iPad
its running at full 768x1024 iPad resolution, with textures, polygons, and the works
but only at about 30 fps! (not fast enough for my purposes)
im pretty sure its not my code, because when i lowered the resolution, the FPS increased, eventually the normal 60 at iPod touch resoultion
Is anyone else encountering this FPS slowdown?
should I reduce the size then scale up?... also, would upgrading to opengl 2.0 increase speed?
any guidance is much appreciated!
The iPad has the exact same GPU as the iPhone 3GS, so you would probably expect worse fullscreen performance on the iPad due to having to push 5 times as many pixels.
If this is the case, then using scaling is probably the best solution. After all, even console developers have to do it!
I had same problem when porting an iPhone game to iPad. There are few optimizations that raised FPS from 5-6 to 20+:
using vbo-s
reducing as much as possible per fragment operations(fog, blend, multi-texturing)
putting some operations on CPU(lights for example)
using multi-texturing instead of multi-pass with blend
improving culling algorithm(now we have a better CPU)