Having said all that, there is no way to tell, in general the simulator run's at full speed on the Mac.

I have 500 sprites and a background and it's down to 20fps on the iPad Sim. the problem is that it could perform worse on the iPad and that is my fear that I will have something ready to go on Day 1 only to test it and it's dirt slow and have to spend a week optimizing it and cutting stuff out.

I guess there is no way to really tell, although if you have a top Mac Pro and you only get 20fps then theres a good chance it will perform slower on the device.

@edison, there's no need for that.

Please do remember that it is a SIMULATOR. It is not the actual hardware. Your program code is being runned on top of a mock iPhone OS that is on top of the Mac OS, meaning it is not running directly on top of the iPhone OS. There's a lot more going on behind the scene to make your app run on the simulator, hence the slow performance. Having 5x more pixels than the iPhone simulator could make a big difference in speed for the iPad simulator. Not to mention the iPad simulator is in BETA, meaning it may not be optimized to run fast either.

If you've ever played around with emulators, think about why is it so hard to emulate hardware (such as the PS2) at a good performance.

Hopefully that's dumbed down enough to understand.

So you're saying that just playing iPhone apps fullscreen is the best this can do? If that was so than iPad is generally useless.

Keep in mind that your performance is entirely dependent on your Mac's performance. Any Mac could simulate an iPhone at full speed, but it's gonna be much tougher for Macs to simulate an iPad. There are 786432 pixels to be drawn on the iPad, compared to 153600 pixels on an iPhone. That's 5 times more pixels. The processor/gpu is maybe twice as fast, at most, so don't expect better overall performance than on the iPhone.

Interesting thread :)

@napierzaza
Performance in simulator depends on many factors, especially how fast your Mac is and how good it implements OpenGL. So it's not the same refreshing smaller window for iPhone simulator as it is for bigger iPad screen.

I wouldn't go so far as wasting my time. You're probably wasting more time responding to this thread.

You are wasting your time worrying about performance on the simulator.

@napierzaza
I wouldn't worry about the simulator right now as the SDK is in beta. Lets not assume iPad simulator is exactly equal in performance to the iphone one.

Uh, yup.

The simulator. So it's perhaps even stranger that there are fps issues as I haven't had that kind of problem with iPhone in the simulator.

@steve I think he means the ipad simulator...

How did you get an iPad?

Is anyone else working on iPad? I made a very skeletal project at this point. I have 64 CCSprites from a single sprite sheet, and a single large background, and it's only able to make 20 fps.

That's 20fps with 64 sprites which are not moving at all.

Could it be that the the fps meter is tuned to the iPhone or is a deeper issue with cocos on iPhone?

I think the amount of sprites is pretty reasonable for such a large screen. And the fact they're not even moving and it can't make 30 fps which is what I set it at.

0.99RC with a translated template.