cocos2d for iPhone

A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine

1. 

   greyhoundgames
   Member

   Has anyone looked at particle effects in .95 when running retina?
   The legendary wars main screen for example now runs at 10 fps on an i4 retina.
   I ran instruments time profiler but the results it showed looked completly bogus.
   First it claimed that 98% of my time was spent in CCDirectorIOS on the glClear line.
   I commented that out and no FPS gain. Then it claimed that 98% of the time was spent in CCSprite glDrawTriangles. Particle effects don't use CCSprite though. And if i just remove the particles things run fine so its them for sure.

   As a side note. If i comment out the glDrawTriangles in CCParticleSystemPoint the FPS goes up to 40. FPS on non retina iphone 4 is 60fps

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   hactar
   Member

   hmm, i just launched legendary wars 1.2 on my iphone 4 and while i dont have an fps counter it looks fluid, so it aint 10 fps...

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   greyhoundgames
   Member

   Yeah but you don't have the retina copy which has not been released ;0

   Posted 1 year ago #
4. 

   hactar
   Member

   ah, you didnt mention you're running your own special version ;)

   I just upgraded to retina too, my fps is fine even with particle effects running. I am however running 1.0 beta.

   Posted 1 year ago #
5. 

   greyhoundgames
   Member

   I did investigation. It looks like its a fill rate issue. The particle size gets scaled by the CC_SCALE_CONTENT_SIZE thingy, which makes sense. So I dont know if there is anything to be done really. For now were just gonna remove that scaling. Most of the effects look fine. A couple thin out a bit.

   Posted 1 year ago #
6. 

   greyhoundgames
   Member

   Just an update on this. There def is a problem with particle effects when using retina vs non retina. If you do a reverse scale on the particles they become the same size as non retina , and even so the retina one is significantly slower then non retina. Has anyone else seen this?

   Posted 1 year ago #
7. 

   Lam
   Member

   oh how I wish this can be fixed so I can rest easy.

   Posted 1 year ago #
8. 

   riq
   Key Master

   A few tips:
   - Which image are you using for the particles ?
   - Since it is a particle, there is no need to provide an "-hd" version of the file. It should work OK with the non-hd image
   - Don't use A8 images in 3rd and 4th gen devices. Although you will gain performance by using A8 images for a particle emitter in 1st and 2nd gen devices, it has the opposite effect on newer devices.

   Posted 1 year ago #
9. 

   Lam
   Member

   Thanks Ricardo for the advice.

   I'll actually run a few tests on the example particles. Maybe we're maxing out texture fill rate in Legendary Wars.

   Posted 1 year ago #
10. 

    greyhoundgames
    Member

    Hey thanks for the input.
    We are not using an hd image. Just a generic 32x32 white fade out circle type for both.

    I put this in as your suggestion indicated in CCParticleSystem
    [CCTexture2D setDefaultAlphaPixelFormat:kTexture2DPixelFormat_RGBA4444];
    self.texture = [[CCTextureCache sharedTextureCache] addImage:textureName];
    [CCTexture2D setDefaultAlphaPixelFormat:kTexture2DPixelFormat_RGBA8888];

    Still sluggish. I am going to run time profiler see if i can get anything usefull. Though that sucker seems to lie a lot on legendary wars(but not by other games for whatever reason).

    Posted 1 year ago #
11. 

    riq
    Key Master

    Try to use a PVRTC-4 image for the particle: 4 bpp instead of 16 bpp (better performance)
    Generate it using PVRTexTool. Encode it with "High Quality", and 8 Iterations (I don't know what "8 iterations" means, but it seems that the output is better)

    Posted 1 year ago #
12. 

    araker
    Moderator

    If glClear is taking a long time that is an indication that previous commands send to the gpu haven't finished yet. Did you run the OpenGL ES instrument, to see if the fill-rate is the real bottleneck? Another thing you could try is the new OpenGL ES analyzer in Xcode 4, which can point out a lot more things.

    Is it an option to change to a quad based system, since they perform better on newer devices.

    Edit I see Riq already made some performance advice.

    Posted 1 year ago #
13. 

    Lam
    Member

    @araker and @riq
    Very interesting. I'll take a look into pvrs and quad particles.

    Posted 1 year ago #
14. 

    riq
    Key Master

    If you are going to use Quads (as @araker said, quads perform better than points on new devices), try the QuadParticle code from 1.0.0-beta. It is a bit faster than the v0.99.5 code.

    Posted 1 year ago #
15. 

    Lam
    Member

    oh hmm. moving to 1.0.0 might be a serious switch. I'll have to think about it if QuadParticles are faster.

    Posted 1 year ago #
16. 

    riq
    Key Master

    @Lam: There is no need to switch to v1.0.0-beta. Just overwrite the QuadParticle code.

    Posted 1 year ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.