iOS iPhone Simulator Performance vs. real hardware

[efwb001]

Hey guys,

I'm working on my second iPhone app, but the first game. I'm running into performance problems (framerate) using OpenGL on the simulator with my game, and the performance seems to be a function of the amount of geometry. I've done everything in the programming guide regarding efficiency except lumping all of my objects into one draw call and nothing has helped.

I've heard the iPhone and the simulator have varying performance, but I was wondering if it's possible that it will perform better when I pay the $99 and put it on my phone? I've played games with what seems like significantly more complex geometry. I'm not using texturing, have one directional light, and have almost exactly 2400 polys in the scene by my count, ~1/5 of which are visible at a time. getting like 2 fps.

Thanks for the help!

 

[DreamPod]

I hate to break it to you, but the simulator tends to run quite a LOT faster than the actual iPhone when it comes to 3D. How much faster depends on your computer, of course, but at work I use a Mac Mini, and it took a lot of optimizing to get our game to run at 25 fps on the iPhone, where it was running at over 30fps in the Simulator the whole time (we lock our game to 30, so hard to tell how much faster it really was). Before the last round of optimizations, the game ran around 15fps on hardware. Of course, it's very possible that some 3D actions will be slower in the Simulator, as it has to convert OpenGL-ES to OSX's native OpenGL, but in my experience, the Simulator is faster than hardware for almost everything.

 

[robbieduncan]

There was a blog post somewhere from a developer who said OpenGL was 100x faster (actually measured to be that much faster) on his Mac Pro than a real iPhone...

 

[kwarren]

I'm afraid I'll have to agree with the other two posts. I'm a coding newb, but the simulator definitely runs much faster than the iPhone itself. However, you may notice a slight increase in speed when you "Release" rather than "Debug" to the phone because the debugger takes up a bit of memory.

As I said, I'm a newb, so if I said something wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me.

 

[fenrus110]

the simulator is exponentially faster than the device. Even using the Leak Tool with the simulator is still much faster than the device.

If you use the Leak Tool on the Device, the Device almost dies from lag.