iOS "low graphics settings"

[XTheLancerX]

I've noticed that the iPad mini 1 performs much smoother in many UI areas than my iPad mini 2 - both running iOS 9.1.

Most notably are the app switcher and spotlight search.

iPad mini 1 - it has all the blurring effects. Almost. It's lacking the effects in the app switcher. How does that contribute to performance? Well, the iPad mini 1 performs excellently here. App switcher is almost 100% perfect, going back to the home screen from here is a little choppy, but nothing even comparing to my iPad mini 2. My iPad mini 2 has all this blurring crap. Scrolling is really choppy, and entering or exiting the switcher is about 20 FPS. What gives? Why can't we disable this unnecessary effect and actually get a smooth experience without making iOS look like garbage? Reduce transparency fixes the switcher (mostly, I STILL see some lags with it on), but everything else looks absolutely god awful.

Spotlight search also is literally perfect on the mini 1, as good as or better than my iPhone 6. Why? I can see that the blurring looks slightly worse, almost with a little grid, it doesn't look that bad though. I noticed this on the iPod 5 as well, which has a Retina display so it's not the mini's non-retina resolution. If you go into the switcher from spotlight on the mini 1, the home screen card stays in the switcher, but changes back upon going back to the home screen. iPad mini 2? It changes back while you are still in the switcher, full laggy animation and everything.

There seems to be some low graphics settings enabled with iOS for A5 devices, helping them out. The new devices need this as well, though!

Another example is the iPad 2 and 3. They have the necessary blurring (folders, dock, etc), but the laggy things (such as the keyboard, control center, Notification Center, banners, spotlight, Siri, and headers) have been disabled. I would prefer the iPad 2/3 UI over the beautiful yet not-so-beautiful lag fest we get on the iPad mini 2/3 and Air. (Possibly iPad 4 as well but I'm not sure, never used one extensively)

Apple already took the blurring out of slide over on pre-A8X devices, it's the same gray transparent effect that iPad 2 and 3 have. Why can't they do the same thing, or at least add an option to A7 iPads? It would ultimately fix 90% of the A7 iPad lag issues that have been occurring since iOS 8, and even in iOS 7!

Sorry, just a little rant with some observations. I'm absolutely sick of the crap my iPad mini 2 has been giving me in terms of UI performance. Stuff needs to be toned down and/or fixed and optimized because a 20FPS app switcher is not acceptable.

 

[Act3]

shame they don't just have a "performance setting" that one can select or more options to choose , kind of like windows has that will disable all the useless eye candy effects.

 

[adnbek]

This exists already. In accessibility settings, turn on "increase contrast".

 

[XTheLancerX]

shame they don't just have a "performance setting" that one can select or more options to choose , kind of like windows has that will disable all the useless eye candy effects.

Yeah I wish they'd add this too because I like all the eye candy, particularly the animations, but some I can definitely live without. Like the blurring of apps in app switcher, blurring of keyboard, blurry safari "favorites" menu that causes frame drops, control center and notification center (these would hurt the worst but the transparent gray overlay on iPad 2/3 is tolerable for me, increase contrast is just too much though with the straight up black and white UI). The iPad mini 1 also has that lower quality blurring that still looks fine, but is so much less laggy (spotlight and power off screen use this I believe)

This exists already. In accessibility settings, turn on "increase contrast".

Problem is, increase contrast looks awful. It's just too much with the folders, dock, passcode screen, spotlight/proactive search etc all being nasty solid colors. I originally included that I hate the way increase contrast looks in the original post but that may have gotten stripped out when I was fixing it up to make more sense. I dunno, it might be still in there but the point remains, increase contrast is overkill and disgusting looking.

 

[gordon1234]

shame they don't just have a "performance setting" that one can select or more options to choose , kind of like windows has that will disable all the useless eye candy effects.

It's funny, actually, because I've always thought this particular dialog in Windows is a great example of why NOT to offer this kind of customization. Turning these options all of / "best performance" mode does absolutely nothing in Windows. This pane was first added in Windows XP, and was mostly designed for tuning extremely low end systems (low end for 2001, that is). It's thoroughly obsolete at this point. Heck, I have a netbook from 2009 that cost me $180 brand-new. It is the slowest piece of crap in the world - it can't even play standard def video at more than about 15 frames a second, it takes almost 5 minutes to boot up, and trying to run more than about 2 apps at a time slows it to a halt. Recent iPhones easily destroy it in terms of wrong performance. Despite all that, it has absolutely no problem running Windows 10 with all effects turned on - turning them off makes it look awful, and offers no performance benefit. Despite this, you'll find tons of Windows "performance" tips that recommend using the "best performance" setting, just because it's there, and turning stuff off always means faster, right?

 

[Act3]

It's funny, actually, because I've always thought this particular dialog in Windows is a great example of why NOT to offer this kind of customization. Turning these options all of / "best performance" mode does absolutely nothing in Windows. This pane was first added in Windows XP, and was mostly designed for tuning extremely low end systems (low end for 2001, that is). It's thoroughly obsolete at this point. Heck, I have a netbook from 2009 that cost me $180 brand-new. It is the slowest piece of crap in the world - it can't even play standard def video at more than about 15 frames a second, it takes almost 5 minutes to boot up, and trying to run more than about 2 apps at a time slows it to a halt. Recent iPhones easily destroy it in terms of wrong performance. Despite all that, it has absolutely no problem running Windows 10 with all effects turned on - turning them off makes it look awful, and offers no performance benefit. Despite this, you'll find tons of Windows "performance" tips that recommend using the "best performance" setting, just because it's there, and turning stuff off always means faster, right?

maybe iOS needs settings like this then. if the "slowest piece of crap in world" has no problems running windows 10 effects, what is wrong with iOS devices that are only a year old? or what is wrong with iOS eye candy animations?

 

[XTheLancerX]

It's funny, actually, because I've always thought this particular dialog in Windows is a great example of why NOT to offer this kind of customization. Turning these options all of / "best performance" mode does absolutely nothing in Windows. This pane was first added in Windows XP, and was mostly designed for tuning extremely low end systems (low end for 2001, that is). It's thoroughly obsolete at this point. Heck, I have a netbook from 2009 that cost me $180 brand-new. It is the slowest piece of crap in the world - it can't even play standard def video at more than about 15 frames a second, it takes almost 5 minutes to boot up, and trying to run more than about 2 apps at a time slows it to a halt. Recent iPhones easily destroy it in terms of wrong performance. Despite all that, it has absolutely no problem running Windows 10 with all effects turned on - turning them off makes it look awful, and offers no performance benefit. Despite this, you'll find tons of Windows "performance" tips that recommend using the "best performance" setting, just because it's there, and turning stuff off always means faster, right?

What matters is, iOS would benefit HUGELY from this. Sure, Windows didn't, but that's Windows, not iOS, where switching apps is 60FPS on a device with hardware from 4 years ago, but a device that's using 2 year old hardware does the same thing at 20FPS. That is only because of an extra graphical effect that could easily be done away with (or optional to the user)

They don't even need to add in a huge list of options, they could just do one setting that is called "lower graphical quality" that switches the device over to the iPad 2/3 UI , or have lower quality blurring like the iPad mini 1 and some things stripped out like the app switcher blurring.

maybe iOS needs settings like this then. if the "slowest piece of crap in world" has no problems running windows 10 effects, what is wrong with iOS devices that are only a year old? or what is wrong with iOS eye candy animations?

Exactly! My iPad is 2 years old, it has had issues from the very beginning with iOS 7! It never could rotate the App Store smoothly, never could rotate the keyboard smoothly, never do control center over folders or keyboards smoothly, never do the Siri animation smoothly... It's pathetic. Why not let us enable the things that let older hardware work pretty much perfectly fine?

 

[C DM]

It's funny, actually, because I've always thought this particular dialog in Windows is a great example of why NOT to offer this kind of customization. Turning these options all of / "best performance" mode does absolutely nothing in Windows. This pane was first added in Windows XP, and was mostly designed for tuning extremely low end systems (low end for 2001, that is). It's thoroughly obsolete at this point. Heck, I have a netbook from 2009 that cost me $180 brand-new. It is the slowest piece of crap in the world - it can't even play standard def video at more than about 15 frames a second, it takes almost 5 minutes to boot up, and trying to run more than about 2 apps at a time slows it to a halt. Recent iPhones easily destroy it in terms of wrong performance. Despite all that, it has absolutely no problem running Windows 10 with all effects turned on - turning them off makes it look awful, and offers no performance benefit. Despite this, you'll find tons of Windows "performance" tips that recommend using the "best performance" setting, just because it's there, and turning stuff off always means faster, right?

Helped a lot in making my experience better for me in Windows where I totally didn't care for movement and animation of anything but still cared about some shadow like effects to give things some depth. So perhaps performance wise it might not have made too much of a difference on decent or good systems (although it likely helped on low end systems), it had the benefit of letting me get rid of things that were getting in the way of my usability (not that those things were bad, just that I didn't want them to be part of my usage).

 

[Act3]

Exactly! My iPad is 2 years old, it has had issues from the very beginning with iOS 7! It never could rotate the App Store smoothly, never could rotate the keyboard smoothly, never do control center over folders or keyboards smoothly, never do the Siri animation smoothly... It's pathetic. Why not let us enable the things that let older hardware work pretty much perfectly fine?

Hate to bring this sore subject up, but people then ask where the "planned obsolescence" conspiracy theories are born? I type this post on a 5 year old I7 desktop that hasn't been challenged yet by anything I run on it.

 

[duffman9000]

maybe iOS needs settings like this then. if the "slowest piece of crap in world" has no problems running windows 10 effects, what is wrong with iOS devices that are only a year old? or what is wrong with iOS eye candy animations?

Because Apple wants you to buy a 6s. My 6+ is sooooo last year.
Apple's claims of desktop-class performance is just a load of crap. Big fat stinky load.

 

[Steve J0bs]

shame they don't just have a "performance setting" that one can select or more options to choose , kind of like windows has that will disable all the useless eye candy effects.

Honestly curious as i use a PC for work unfortunately. Does adjusting for best performance actually have a noticeable effect on modern PCs?

Edit: Just re-read through his page and saw that someone mentioned that it pretty much doesn't have any noticeable effect.

 

[C DM]

Honestly curious as i use a PC for work unfortunately. Does adjusting for best performance actually have a noticeable effect on modern PCs?

Edit: Just re-read through his page and saw that someone mentioned that it pretty much doesn't have any noticeable effect.

Noticeable performance effect on good/decent hardware? Not much. Noticeable effect in general, as in seeing something different based on different options? Sure, that's certainly there.

 

[gordon1234]

Honestly curious as i use a PC for work unfortunately. Does adjusting for best performance actually have a noticeable effect on modern PCs?

Edit: Just re-read through his page and saw that someone mentioned that it pretty much doesn't have any noticeable effect.

Not only does it not help, but on Vista and Windows 7, turning them all off can actually make performance worse, as the "best performance" option disables the compositing 2D graphics system. The old non-compositing desktop is far more CPU-bound, while the new one offloads most of the UI display work to the GPU. For instance, on the piece of crap netbook I mentioned above—which is highly CPU-constrained—Windows 7 is significantly slower on the "best performance setting" with a far less responsive UI and severe tearing and flickering. Windows 8 and above remove the old graphic subsystem entirely, so this isn't an issue any longer.

 

[minato21]

I just wish they let us choose which iOS look we want. I.g iOS 6, 7, 9 and choose what parts we want. So say we can have the app switcher from ios 9, the dock from 6 and the icons/status bar from either one. At least some sort of customization. I remember I had a jailbreak that removed blur back on 8.4 (or whichever one you could) so why not let us disable it in certain places?

I want the dock from ios 6 because it looks better and you can actually see the bottom of your wallpaper.