There are a ton of factors to consider when dealing with framerate; the engine you are using, the amount of draw calls, the texture sizes and amount of them, what kind of scripts are running, and then also tri count.
Generally you will want to research what is best for your Engine on that platform. But I would say just keep tri count lowish, also try some things see what you can get away with. Sorry I wish there was a hard set rule for this stuff but it doesn't really work that way.
If this is more for portfolio type work though and your not taking it into an actual engine I would just follow what other iPhone games are doing as your limits.
10,000 sounds about right as a maximum limit. However, I'd aim for around 7k or as low as you can get.
If I remember, the iPhone 4s tend to be fill rate bound due to the large screen resolution and comparitiely feeble graphics processor. So the less polygons and alpha'd stuff the better.
Another thing to think about is if you really want to shoot for the 4s as your target spec, or if it might be better to ensure people not on the bleeding edge are still able to run the game/app at anything faster than slideshow.
Its basically an ipad2 in a small box , you've got a shedload of resources compared to the iphone4 but you have to be just as careful about how you use them.
As said above you're limited by a weak GPU rather than memory. complex shaders and dirty skinning seem to be the things that have the most negative effect on performance at least on our engine ( we use a lot of CPU doing image recognition and tracking so try to do as much as possible on the GPU )
you can chuck a surprising amount of tris at them provided you do so efficiently - we've had well built skinned models at 20k with 100 bones running around fine on an iphone4 but equally I've seen it struggle with half those numbers on a badly setup model
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Generally you will want to research what is best for your Engine on that platform. But I would say just keep tri count lowish, also try some things see what you can get away with. Sorry I wish there was a hard set rule for this stuff but it doesn't really work that way.
If this is more for portfolio type work though and your not taking it into an actual engine I would just follow what other iPhone games are doing as your limits.
If I remember, the iPhone 4s tend to be fill rate bound due to the large screen resolution and comparitiely feeble graphics processor. So the less polygons and alpha'd stuff the better.
As said above you're limited by a weak GPU rather than memory. complex shaders and dirty skinning seem to be the things that have the most negative effect on performance at least on our engine ( we use a lot of CPU doing image recognition and tracking so try to do as much as possible on the GPU )
you can chuck a surprising amount of tris at them provided you do so efficiently - we've had well built skinned models at 20k with 100 bones running around fine on an iphone4 but equally I've seen it struggle with half those numbers on a badly setup model