Unity - iPod Mobile Triangle budget

Treboras

Hi guys,

in the very near future I have the opportunity to contribute to a small mobile game for the iPod, realized with unity and I would really be very grateful, if you guys can help me out with some answers

- What triangle count can the iPad (1+2) handle on screen / total loaded?
- what texture resolutions can the iPad (1+2) handle? (normal map, spec and diffuse)

Thank you very much for the answers!

Ben Apuna

I don't have any experience working on iPads. You might be able to glean some good info from:

Game From Scratch - A Question of Power...

Lennyagony

In addition to your triangle and texture resolution you will want to watch your draw calls with unity + ipod/pad

Campaignjunkie

It also depends on a bunch of other stuff: are you using OnGUI to draw the HUD, which is generally pretty expensive? Are you instantiating a lot of game objects within the scene? Lots of alpha transparency? Real-time lights?

There's no "regular" budget, it depends entirely on what everything else in the game is using. Sometimes 10k in the camera view is too much. Sometimes 40k is too much. Sometimes 1024 x 1024 is too much.

I would make a placeholder asset or two and benchmark performance on the iPad itself.

Ben Apuna

These might be worth a look over:

AltDevBlogADay - Performance Anxiety
AltDevBlogADay - Performance Anxiety 2 You're Doing it Wrong

Treboras

Thank you very much for your replies, I will look into those helpful links!

bugo

There's a bunch of things u can do to help minimize issues later on, list of tips:

- avoid using alpha testing
- try your best to not get more than 12-15 draw calls
- use sprite manager 2 for your interface.
- DO NOT USE the default Unity GUI
- no texture bigger than 1024 (pack textures as much as possible)
- use as less materials as possible
- less than 5 particles per emitter. NO BIG particles, costs fillrate.
- less bones, better speed
- careful with fillrate, blending costs a lot on iphone.
- as always, better baked lights to verts/map than using realtime lighting. If you use lights, use one only.

commander_keen

bugo wrote: »

There's a bunch of things u can do to help minimize issues later on, list of tips:

- avoid using alpha testing
- try your best to not get more than 12-15 draw calls
- use sprite manager 2 for your interface.
- DO NOT USE the default Unity GUI
- no texture bigger than 1024 (pack textures as much as possible)
- use as less materials as possible
- less than 5 particles per emitter. NO BIG particles, costs fillrate.
- less bones, better speed
- careful with fillrate, blending costs a lot on iphone.
- as always, better baked lights to verts/map than using realtime lighting. If you use lights, use one only.

This seems about right for iphone 3G. For current gen iphone and ipad you should be able to get away with quite a bit more. I only have a 3G so I dont have any experience with higher end models.