It's not retina. Really?

[JBRUU]

It's underpowered in gpu, not CPU. CPU has nothing to do with framerate issues with retina.

[Frand]

One approach to possibly consider is to render the in-game 3D at regular iPad resolution (with AA if you wish), but HUD elements and any text with retina sharpness.

The biggest benefit from retina is with font legibility anyway, so with such an approach you could safely say the game has been enhanced for retina iPads.

[Rubicon]

That's a good idea.

[DemonJim]

What Frand says. I forgive lower res for higher framerates in 3D, but all OSD elements should still be Retina.

In addition to this, using Retina isn't an all-or-nothing thing - it's a sliding scale.

So for example you can set the contentScaleFactor for your 3D render target to 1.5, which will actually be 50% Retina (where 1.0 is non-Retina and 2.0 is full Retina). The resolution (in terms of pixel shaders) is effectively halfway in between the two.

Another idea is to render the basic scene at full Retina but do all post-production effects (bloom, depth of field, explosion/smoke billboards etc) at lower res.

[Rubicon]

No such options for us. The real killer is the terrain pixel shader now it has to handle the fog of war, or the water shader which has always been a hog.

These kinda thoughts apply generally though, I agree.

[NinthNinja]

I think the problem with iPad Retina or why developers say it's bad for frame rates is because the hardware has not been utilised by the programmers the right way... You really need to optimise from the word go with no half measures.

This is what is possible or what Mutant Storm on the Retina can achieve:

1. 60fps framerate.
2. Two render targets at 1024x768 processing feedback effects.
3. One render target at 2048x1536 processing level and enemies.
4. The 2048x1536 render target having post processing effects to simulate glow.
5. And then a copy to a 2048x1536 frame buffer.
6. And to top all that off alpha polygons out number solid polygons in the graphics department.
7. The use of 32bit colour on textures, frame buffers and render targets.

In theory all this should grind the framerate down but in practise the game runs at a solid 60fps without a hiccup. The only thing that has effected framerate is when Game Center boots up.

But the point I'm making is that the hardware is not underpowered and it can actually process a fair amount of pixels.

In a marketing sense it makes sense to go for this because you will highly be likely to get featured by Apple.


That trick of rendering into a lower rez render target and drawing the hud at a higher resolution is what I did for the iPad1 version of Mutant Storm - I'm actually surprised that the iPad1 can handle quite a few render targets.


Anyway, I hope no one takes offence with this post... it's just another point of view on what is possible on iPad Retina.

[Rubicon]

No offense here, we've never been able to figure out what our core fps issue is.

Our game doesn't have a bad frame rate but it's always been lower than what my gut tells me it should be. We've spent weeks with various analysers trying all the tricks - 1x1 textures, "just colour" shaders, drawing cubes instead of models etc. etc. There's no newbie mistakes in our engine, it just draws a shitload of stuff.

Are you using "packed" vertex formats? One thing we've never tried it making them "worse" by using floats for normals instead of an U8 type etc.

[DemonJim]

Given what you've said you've tried while investigating the bottleneck Rubicon my hunch (assuming you're not vertex-bound) is that there are just too many GL state changes going on.

[Rubicon]

It's not state-changes. Our engine already sorts the rendering list to minimise them and one time we took the dirty cache out and let it set every state, even if it's already set. No change.

We've never been able to test if we're vertex bound tbh, but I wouldn't think so - not drawing the units didn't give much back and the terrain models didn't increase when we saved out simpler ones (the meshes are all cpu extruded in a tool - as a manifold, no overdraw).

We came to the conclusion we were chasing ghosts and have no true bottlenecks, we're just drawing shitloads of stuff - it may not look it but there's a bucketload of graphics in our game.

[DemonJim]

Maybe it's that sort algorithm? That's (mostly) a joke by the way

Still, I really don't understand why you can't try what I said above having 'partial Retina' by setting the contentScaleFactor somewhere between 1.0 and 2.0 - I suppose that depends if you're using middleware which supports it (if not, get them to add it!)