list of heavily graphical games and how they perform on iphone 3g.

[chickdigger802]

The main issue with iphone games review sites is that they review all the new apps on the iphone 3gs or 3rd gen ipod touch. So it's hard to get a reading on how well an app would perform on the iphone 3g, especially now that many app developers are developing pretty nifty games with pretty amazing 3d graphics. So I've decided to compile a list. This list will be ongoing.

Because of my limited budget, I can't really afford to buy ALL the iphone games out there, so chime in if there is a game that ain't on this list and you own it. This is more of a community project anyways =)

Will update daily or weekly or w/e I have time with the list of games that has been posted =)

note: All games played after a fresh restart or through an app (ie: freememory)

Super smooth
- Jet Car Stunts
- Battle Bears
- Skies of Glory
- F.A.S.T
- The Deep Pinball
- Wild West Pinball
- Minigore
- Homerun Battle 3D
- OMG pirates!
- Rocket Bird
- Dance Dance Revolution
- All Lazrhog Games (lazrhog)
- Backbreaker Football (funkynubman)
- Ground Effect

Smooth with a few moments of framerate drop
- Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.
- TouchPets Dogs
- Samurai: Way of the Warrior
- Rolando 2
- Hero of Sparta

Playable but framerate is pretty bad
- Glyder 2
- Hybrid
- NBA live
- Assassin's Creed II

Unplayablely laggy or Crashes alot
- Tap Tap 2.6, 3
- Rock Band
- World of Tunes

Note: I consider if you can't perfect a song in a rhythm game (ie: no lag), it isn't playable.

So lets get this started =)

[lazrhog]

Super Smooth: All Lazrhog Games :) I only own an iPod 1G and an iPhone 3G !

[funkynubman]

Add Backbreaker Football, which should run uber-smooth.

Also, how does Assassin's Creed II work on the 3g? It's pretty laggy on the second generation, so just curious.

[sid187]

where dose the 3g iphone compare to the ipod touch 2. reason i ask is glyders 2 plays great on mine.. so got me wondering.

chris.

[Noman]

Rock band and TTR3 run without a hitch on my itouch 2g. Glyder 2 runs fine also.

[bobz56]

tap tap is perfect for me.

[chickdigger802]

ipod touch 2nd gen is remarkably faster than iphone 3g...

it's like iphone 1gen, ipod touch 1gen, iphone 3g, ipod touch 2nd gen, iphone 3gs= ipod touch 3rd gen. In order of slowest to fastest.

[motitas]

add assasins creed 2 to un playably laggy!

[Rizhome]

tap tap revenge 3 runs perfectly for me too.
hero of sparta is kinda smooth, but with framerate drops in large battles.

[chickdigger802]

tap tap revenge 3 runs perfectly for me too.
hero of sparta is kinda smooth, but with framerate drops in large battles.

hmm have you tried playing online or on extreme? It lags enough to screw u up...

[YeahMePete]

Hmm, chickdigger, there are a few on your list that I gotta say don't exactly push the limits as far as "heavily graphic." Don't get me wrong. They're all well done by very talented artists/devs and some of them certainly do. There are some though that use a little "trickery" to make it look like more is going on than really is.

So what's graphically heavy? As a dev I can say in our latest game...
- Audio is about 45% of our memory footprint.
- We're pushing it on draw calls at 35-40 per frame depending on what's up.
- We optimized our animations to the lowest possible impact
- We kept poly count (too) low to help render time
- We stuffed as many textures on to one sheet as we could
- We optimized our scripts to barely have an impact on frame time.
- We optimized garbage collection (memory clean up) to happen mostly behind the scenes.

Not to take away from the folks you listed. They're talented artists, savvy devs and I like most of those games! For the most part they run really well too. Sure can't argue with that. But, that doesn't automatically mean "graphically heavy." Our game is (technically) graphically heavy but our first review was "animation is good but poly count is low." I agree with that and we're adding some eye candy because we have room on that end. But even so, we probably won't make your list because it's kind of "style" based not actual tech-barrier-pushing if that make sense. The iPhone/Pod is a credit card sized calculator. To run 3D on it at all rocks my boat! :)

[TrueAxis]

Jet Car Stunts used quite a lot of trickery to achieve the framerate... For instance we did not bog down the cpu with scene culling. We calculated how many vertices you could throw at the GPU without slow down, then built the world around that count. All the lighting came from one texture map, so when we came to draw the world, we just changed to the lighting map and drew the whole world. This meant the draw distance is spot on - you can look across the whole level from end to end and see everything.

We used a non-standard game loop that gained about 10% back to the CPU.

We also built our own optimized sound engine which used ARM SIMD instructions to process the samples in 8 byte chunks and processed everything in the sound render callback.

All vertices were packed down to the smallest possible sizes.

I was pretty astounded that a 1st gen iPod ran the game at a solid 30fps when we got the first tests up and running - the game runs at 48 fps on these devices... the 18 fps went onto making the inputs extremely responsive.

When Space Tripper finally gets done (our next game), I would say this will be the most optimized game on the iDevices - this game just pushes everything to the limits.

[YeahMePete]

@TrueAxis... awesome stuff. Many kudos! Really great game and glad you posted... 'nuff said. :D

ps... I sure didn't mean to suggest any dev made short cuts on anything. All of them are great games. I just meant to point out technologically pushing it versus eye candy pushing it.

[edit: ok not nuff said... TrueAxis' post highlights what I mean about what devs go through to "get it to run... fast!" Great game, great job!]

[chickdigger802]

Hmm, chickdigger, there are a few on your list that I gotta say don't exactly push the limits as far as "heavily graphic." Don't get me wrong. They're all well done by very talented artists/devs and some of them certainly do. There are some though that use a little "trickery" to make it look like more is going on than really is.

So what's graphically heavy? As a dev I can say in our latest game...
- Audio is about 45% of our memory footprint.
- We're pushing it on draw calls at 35-40 per frame depending on what's up.
- We optimized our animations to the lowest possible impact
- We kept poly count (too) low to help render time
- We stuffed as many textures on to one sheet as we could
- We optimized our scripts to barely have an impact on frame time.
- We optimized garbage collection (memory clean up) to happen mostly behind the scenes.

Not to take away from the folks you listed. They're talented artists, savvy devs and I like most of those games! For the most part they run really well too. Sure can't argue with that. But, that doesn't automatically mean "graphically heavy." Our game is (technically) graphically heavy but our first review was "animation is good but poly count is low." I agree with that and we're adding some eye candy because we have room on that end. But even so, we probably won't make your list because it's kind of "style" based not actual tech-barrier-pushing if that make sense. The iPhone/Pod is a credit card sized calculator. To run 3D on it at all rocks my boat! :)

Ya, I know what you mean, I couldn't really think up a better title name...

I'm just basically trying to compile a list of games that give you the feeling ' Looks awesome, but not too sure if my old device can handle it'. And because the standard reviewing unit for review sites is either iphone 3gs or 3rd gen ipod touch, it's hard to get a read on how well the game performs on the older units =)

I'd gladly add your games on the list as well if ya list them =)

Basically, any game that doesn't look like a bad effort flash game is fair game for my list.

[Fruho]

I have a 3GS........and even on it Assassins Creed II has slight lag issues. GTA: CTW is flawless though. I played it on a 3G once and I found it's framerate to be fine.....have you jailbroken your 3G? Jailbreaking severly impacts your framerate

[YeahMePete]

it's hard to get a read on how well the game performs on the older units =)
I can't speak for everyone but I can say that we decided early on that 3g/2nd gen was going to be our baseline. We targeted having our game to run around 30 FPS on those and that's pretty much what we hit. We could push it to run faster but we also looked at battery life etc. We don't *officially* support 1st gen devices but we have tested it on them. Runs fine as far as we can see. So why not officially support them? We plan on throwing more at it and think our plans will be a little tough to pull off on 1st gens. Anyway, just throwing one devs attitude out there for ya and that some of us do consider this stuff even if we don't pull it off. Not that it really helps your list... sorry OT! :o

I'd gladly add your games on the list as well if ya list them =)
Nah, I'll put it in my sig some day. Besides, you'd have to test and confirm or we'd be lying! :D

[GlennX]

Ground Effect runs at 30 FPS on the 3g. I don't think there are many fully 3D games on the platform that run any faster.

That said, 30 FPS could be said to be slow compared to the 60 FPS that it manages on the 3gs or 3rd gen iPod Touch. The game interpolates all animations to match the frame rate so the game is only smoother looking at 60, it actually plays the same on all devices. This technique is used in a lot of PC games where a fast machine might be 10x faster than your minimum spec.

On a 3gs or 3rd gen touch you can also put on your 3D glasses and play the stereo version (which basically draws everything twice) at 30 FPS.

[TrueAxis]

I can't speak for everyone but I can say that we decided early on that 3g/2nd gen was going to be our baseline. We targeted having our game to run around 30 FPS on those and that's pretty much what we hit. We could push it to run faster but we also looked at battery life etc. We don't *officially* support 1st gen devices but we have tested it on them. Runs fine as far as we can see. So why not officially support them? We plan on throwing more at it and think our plans will be a little tough to pull off on 1st gens. Anyway, just throwing one devs attitude out there for ya and that some of us do consider this stuff even if we don't pull it off. Not that it really helps your list... sorry OT! :o


It seems this thread is been hijacked by devs ;)

As I said before our next game Space Tripper will probably be the most optimized game on the iPhone. Most of the logic is highly optimized Arm/Vfp assembly language - when I started the project the 3gs hardware was never considered because the hardware did not exist but Vfp code pipelines bad on the Cortex cpus (in the case of Space Tripper this does not matter because on that cpu the code is running very fast anyway) so I left the code to run for Arm 11 cpus.

I've pulled every trick I know of to make the Gpu as efficient as possible. One of the biggest things I did was convert all the level data into a PVS to look up what needs to be draw on the screen. Each PVS cell has a list of vertices and indexes sorted in an order that makes the cpu cache very efficient. This comes off with trade offs and the level data can be up to 3megs. For the baddies I use a texture atlas (512x512) for the solid polygons. This means I can build a big list and draw the baddies with one render call. All baddies are software skinned, transformed from object space to word space, back faced and lit by the Cpu - this is actually quicker than using the Gpu. All alpha polygons have a texture atlas as well.

Anyway, even by doing all this the later full on levels have trouble on the 1st gen hardware. The easiest thing to do is just drop the older hardware but there's something inside me that says if I can get the game to run perfect on this older hardware then True Axis would have the most technical impressive game EVER to run on all the iDevices. Even now at its present condition, for a 3D game it is running better than most 2D games would ever hope for. I've still got a couple of ideas left to implement so there is hope that I can get it to run on the older hardware.

[YeahMePete]

Lol yeah-sorry for the hijack! That's cool stuff TrueAxis-kind of stuff I'd wanna read about! :) /OT again!

[chickdigger802]

Ya, I consider 'smooth' as a consistent framerate. solid 30 is smooth enough for most cases. If it drops under 20 or to a point that it affects gameplay, that's when the framerate is an issue.

[YeahMePete]

definitely. when fps jumps all over the place it's no good. 100 fps dropping to 40 feels worse than a constant 30. agreed! :)

[GlennX]

definitely. when fps jumps all over the place it's no good. 100 fps dropping to 40 feels worse than a constant 30. agreed! :)

That depends how the game handles it's timing. If it actually slows down you are absolutely correct but if it drops frames elegantly while keeping everything moving at the same speed it can work very well.

Imagine a game that regularly has large explosions on screen for a few seconds, people don't tend to notice dropped frames (caused by the graphics chip having to do several times as much pixel rendering with alpha) as long as there is plenty happening in their face. Running Quake 1 with the FPS readout on was a revelation back in the day. A solid 35 FPS on my 70 hz monitor but just firing a rocket down a narrow corridor and forcing a lot of light map rebuilds caused it to drop to 7 FPS for a few seconds. With the rocket trail in my face and the walls dynamically lighting up I really hadn't noticed the 'slowdown' but then, it wasn't really a "slowdown", more of a very elegantly handled "smoothdown".

The thing I'm working on right now works like this, as does Ground Effect to some extent. It's definitely preferable to limiting my frame rate and pyrotechnic effects to what a 1g device can handle for the game I'm writing.

[chickdigger802]

That depends how the game handles it's timing. If it actually slows down you are absolutely correct but if it drops frames elegantly while keeping everything moving at the same speed it can work very well.

Imagine a game that regularly has large explosions on screen for a few seconds, people don't tend to notice dropped frames (caused by the graphics chip having to do several times as much pixel rendering with alpha) as long as there is plenty happening in their face. Running Quake 1 with the FPS readout on was a revelation back in the day. A solid 35 FPS on my 70 hz monitor but just firing a rocket down a narrow corridor and forcing a lot of light map rebuilds caused it to drop to 7 FPS for a few seconds. With the rocket trail in my face and the walls dynamically lighting up I really hadn't noticed the 'slowdown' but then, it wasn't really a "slowdown", more of a very elegantly handled "smoothdown".

The thing I'm working on right now works like this, as does Ground Effect to some extent. It's definitely preferable to limiting my frame rate and pyrotechnic effects to what a 1g device can handle for the game I'm writing.

This is also dependant on what type of game as well. For something like a turn based game, a consistent framerate is preferable, but ultimately doesn't affect much of the gameplay. Inconsistent framerate for more control oriented games like a vertical shooter or a music game, in which reaction is what matters, framerate can easily turn an enjoyable game to frustrating game.

Anyhow give me more games to put on the list. Even you dev's must have played some games as well right?

[chickdigger802]

Bump this up =)