If this were the case, then every game would be running bad. People have different opinions about smooth performance. Edit: no reason to move my very first post into this thread.
The iPad has 4X the number of pixels to render compared to the iPhone. They both share the same A7 chip, with the only difference being a slight clock speed bump in the iPad. If developers want their games to both run and look identical, they either need to lock them to the same resolution, which would make them look blurry on the iPad, or they need to target the iPad for all optimizations, which would leave some potential visual gains on the table for the iPhone. The other option is to target the iPad, but continue to enhance the iPhone version with the extra headroom afforded by the reduced resolution. This makes for an amazing looking game on the iPhone, with the trade-off being that the iPad will look worse in head-to-head comparisons. I'm not sure what else there is to say on the matter. There is literally no other option here. The A7 chip is ridiculously overpowered for the iPhone, and puts the phone in a somewhat higher performance tier than the iPad at their native resolutions. A resolution increase to the next iPhone might even out performance across the line a bit, but as long as developers spend a little bit of time optimizing for each device, I don't see what the big deal is with one looking better than the other.
Unplayable? I just played the first ten minutes of Deus Ex and Wild Blood there (up to the Dragon boss battle) and they both ran fine (not 60fps console quality but still smooth enough). More than fine in fact. I've played GodFire to death on my Air and didn't even know there was a graphics slider in the settings, again identical performance to my old iPad 4. The footage of MC5 on the iPad Air and iPhone 5s is the first time I've seen iPad Air footage and thought it looked choppy. The annoying thing is that it's not power, it's just lazy coding and a lack of optimisation. Are you running your iPad too close to its capacity?
Deus Ex runs twice as fast on my iPhone 5. I had played through it on my 5 before I got my Mini Retina. Differences are night and day. I don't want to play games at barely 20 fps and therefore I call it unplayable, yes. Look, my device is okay cuz it plays the same on my friends iPads. It's just that some people have different opinions of smooth. Did you read how many people were telling MC5 is running super smooth on their A7 device? I did. But another bunch of ppl said it isn't smooth. So, who's right? (GTA SA had the same scenario btw). I don't want to discuss this anymore cuz it's pointless. 4GB left.
It's not that the A7 is underpowered. It's a powerhouse that is roughly 50% more powerful than the A6X. And with iOS 8 Metal, it going to truly shine. The truth is that the games are just not optimised.
I know, I'm not playing on an iPad Air but an iPad Mini retina instead, but someone may find this helpful. I haven't played singleplayer much, but seems OK. I have MAJOR framerate issues in multiplayer. Venice map has less than ideal framerate, less than 30 most of the time and when I run to the big stairs in the centre it drops to 20/15, unplayable. In "Roofs" the fog seems to come and go, and when it's there, it gets worse. The worst thing, however, is the fact that it drops like 5 frames when I zoom to aim, so it's almost unplayable there... I really hope they adress all this performance issues. If anyone suffers from something similar, please reply
I think Metal will just become another reason for developers to become even more lazy with optimizing their games. Another thing is, with iOS 8 and Metal, Apple will most likely implementing Imaginations new GX6650 GPU (192 cores,etc. like Tegra K1) in their A8 SoC which will be a HUGE step over the A7's actual GPU. It's like night and day between these two GPU's. So, if you're serious about iOS hardcore gaming and the best graphics you can get on mobile devices (which I do), it's already to late for the A7 to "shine", imo.
I know what Metal is lol. It definitely wont magically optimise a game for SoC's which are running on new GPU architectures like the A7 especially when taking into account that many games have better performance on iPad 4 than on Air or Mini Retina. FYI, Metal wont speed up gaming performance out of the box. It just works better for specific aspects in processing graphics such as better performing draw calls and lowering CPU usage (though, the CPU architecture remained still the same -or at least don't changed that much as the GPU did- after A7 Upgrade and beside that is mostly used for physics, AI and low level processing only, so this isn't the reason for the laggieness which we have today with the A7. It's the non-optimisation on the GPU part). By using Metal, Devs still have to optimise their games for the new GPU architecture no matter what PLUS coding their games to utilize Metal at all, which is a completely new API. This isn't "oh, I'll just throw my game at Metal, no need for optimization". But that's what most ppl think it is. It's the same as it is with mostly every new generation for pc graphic cards, but seems like iOS devs didn't realised that as of yet.
Exactly. Optimising for Metal is hard work and hence your statement about developers being lazy didn't make sense. Very few games will advantage of Metal I.e iOS exclusives. However my point was that A7 is still very powerful. Due to changes in architecture between the A6X and A7, games that have been development for longer than 6 months have not been optimised for it. I believe MC5 was delayed multiple times?
The devs which have created Oceanhorn optimised it for A7 devices within 2 weeks. Before: 20-25fps After: rocksolid 60fps Just saying. The reason why I said this is explained in the last part of my last posting. I meant still lazy on optimizing it for the A7.
