I made an iPhone app using Apple's SceneKit. On iPhone 5s the app runs with 60fps with very occasional drops to 40fps (I think that happens when not much is changing in the scene). I tried to run the same app, made absolutely no chnages to the code, on an iPad 3 and the app has a huuuuge lag. fps never go above 16. I was comparing the gpu models of 5s and iPad 3 and they are both A7. Why am I experiencing such drastic drop in fps? Is this a hardware problem and I need to lower the graphical intensity of my app?
Edit: the iPad is 3 years in use iOS9, 5s 7 months and runs iOS8.4
They have different GPUs and CPUs.
The iPad 3 was the first with a retina display which means 4 times display resulution over the iPad2. The Pad was quickly replaced with the iPad 4 wich had a stromger GPU with higher clockspeed. Btw the iPad 3 had aARM-Cortex A9 CPU with 1 Ghz and the iPad 4 came with one of Apples first oen CPUs called Apple Swift running at 1,4 GHz.
As for your scene. Might be best if you create less objects on that device or exclude it from the compability list.
Related
iPad Pro simulators are so slow that they become practically useless when running my cocos2dx game. Theoretical FPS displayed is 60, but all animations take minutes instead of seconds (e.g. 30 seconds instead of a fraction of a second).
I made sure 100 times that Slow Animations are turned off on my simulator.
I've found this topic: iOS Simulator games run very slow (low fps) where the reasons for possible poor simulator performance are explained, but:
First, I can't deduce HOW slow their simulators are (they complain about bad FPS, my theoretical fps is good (???)). I'm getting the impression that they are able to test something while I am not
Second, I need a solution to this problem as I need to test my stuff on an ipad pro 12.9 inch and I don't have the funds to buy one for tests now :) . However, I am thinking on getting a better macbook.
I am using Macbook Air 2014 with 4GB RAM. Do you think this might be the reason? Can anyone tell me whether they are using ipad pro simulators when testing their games (Cocos, Unity, SpriteKit?), and if you get decent speed, then what are your Mac specs that might affect performance (processor, RAM?)
The simulator is not a device and it's performance varies depending on the machine you're running it on, but also the type of device you're simulating.
The iPad Pro devices are both large and have a retina display. The simulator has to process 2732 x 2048 (12.9" 5.6M pixels) and 2048 x 1536 (9.7" 3M pixels). The iPhone 6/6plus and later models have similarly high pixel counts. This takes a lot of CPU+GPU power to render all those pixels.
Your Macbook Air is decent, but it's screen has a much smaller resolution than the simulator and its GPU was chosen with its smaller screen-size in mind. The integrated intel graphics aren't that performant.
If you can test out running the same game/app as a Mac application instead you should see better performance.
My advice:
Use 30fps during daily testing (or when in debug mode) director->setAnimationInterval(1.f/30.f);, if your game requires 60fps for its gameplay then you may want to look into other options.
You can also add one of the non-retina iPad simulators for testing. iPad Mini or iPad 2. Test on the Pro simulators periodically only to check for any positioning/scaling issues.
Render to a small(er) frame buffer and then render the frame buffer scaled up into the final screen buffer.
It is always recommended to get an actual device when doing mobile development as the simulators/emulators don't provide real world performance characteristics.
Even though it's not what you're asking I'd still repeat the key point in the linked answer: Only worry about performance when running on an actual device, and find a way to not have it affect.
Unity 5.1.2 iOS 8.4
Ive noticed massive performance issues with iPhone 6 Plus
Tested on iPhones 4s, 5, 6 performance looks about that Running solid 60 FPS
On iPhone 6 Plus however performance is going down to about 22 FPS for some reason. Unity profiler simply shows longer time to render.
Here is the log for iPhone 6 Plus
Notice average frame time is higher and max frame time is doubled that iPhone 4s?
Im wondering if this is just me or the Unity bug, probably with Metal?
I have had this issue before, the iPhone 6 plus will use the metal graphics library by default. Unfortunately this is very buggy at the moment and actually slows everything down! Go to your player settings/Other settings and untick "Automatic Graphics API" and choose OpenGLES2, this is the most stable library at the moment.
I am developing a graphic intensive game in iOS7.
The app is tested in iphone 5 with good performance
but a bit lag and slower in iPAD air.
The CPU should be pretty much the same or iPAD air should be even faster.
But the rendering seems a bit slow in iPAD.
My app is in iOS7 based on iphone in XCode project.
are some plist parameters issue or app build setting issue?
The iPad Air actually has better hardware than iPhone 5.
iPhone 5
1.3 GHz dual-core Apple-designed ARMv7s Apple A6
PowerVR SGX543MP3 (tri-core, 266 MHz) GPU
1GB LPDDR2 DRAM
iPad Air
1.4 GHz dual-core 64-bit Apple A7 SoC with M7 motion coprocessor
PowerVR G6430 (4-core) GPU
1 GB LPDDR3 DRAM
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_devices
I think the higher screen resolution of the iPad, though, actually makes for worse performance on it. I would suggest optimizing your code the way you would if it were slow on both devices.
It may seem like you would always want to test your app on all devices that Apple offers: the iPad 2, iPad mini, and iPad 4. But its expensive or difficult to obtain all three devices and keep them around just for testing.
The iPad 2 and mini both have 512MB DDR2, use the 1GHz dual core A9, a Dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 and have the same screen resolution. It seems like its the same hardware all together.
Is there likely to be any difference between these two devices that could cause a problem with an app, other than the obvious physically smaller screen size?
Honestly it depends on what the app is. Like you said, screen size is different, but that may have a small effect on the usability of the app.
Other than that, I don't know. Sorry.
I have an app that works on iPad 1st gen. This is a game, made using cocos2d framework.
The first iPad does have 256mb ram and using instruments(the memory monitor tool) i was able to determine that the app works at around ~90-110mb ram on the device (well lets just trust "Physical Memory Used" chart though the "Physical Memory Free" at the very beginning shows it is ~128mb free and then gets to ~3-4mb free after playing several levels and never gets higher)
So while it does have enough memory it caches the assets and when it runs out of ram the cached assets get released.
What i did is added the high res graphics to it. Almost all of the assets are loaded as 4bit assets so say if i have an asset 100x100 pix it will consume 100x100x4 = 40000 bytes ram; the same hd image will be 200x200 pix and will consume 200x200x4 = 16000 bytes ram; which is 4 times bigger!
So the question is - will it work fine on iPad 2 hd screen which has 512mb ram?
See if i multiply ~110mb*4 it will be ~440mb, what means it will be 512 - ~440 = ~72mb left for system. So i do not know if that is enough for system and it won't close the app. I am not sure but i think the 1st gen iPad may give around ~120-130mb ram for the app and then will close it. So that makes me think this won't work on the iPad2. Am i likely correct?
ps: i've tested the app on the 3d gen iPad which has 1gb ram and it runs just fine
The iPad 2 has the same screen resolution as the original iPad, so it will not use the new retina artwork that you are adding to the app. This means it should run fine on the iPad 2 if its already running original iPad.
The iPad 2 does not have a retina screen, so the physical resolution of the iPad 2 is the same as on the iPad 1. Only do the retina style images on a device that supports it, this way you keep memory low on device that can't handle the retina resolution.