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Android performance VS IOS
I'm sure this question has been asked many many times, and I've done hours of searching but I still haven't found what I'm looking for.
I'm currently developing a tower defense game for Android. It's pretty intensive and not simple, as a result I've concluded that the Android device needs to be a minimum of 1.2GHz dual core with 1gb of ram.
I've ran the app on my Droid x2 which is a 1gh dual core with 512mb of ram and it runs ok. It lags a bit but is possible to play.
I use my Samsung Galaxy s3 as my main phone for development and its a 1.3GHz dual core with 2gb of ram and it runs my app like a champ. It sometimes lags (Gets around 10FPS for a few seconds) but majority of the time it's at 25-45 FPS.
With that being said I know what the "specs" required for Android are. The issue I'm having is I can't test my app on any iDevices because I haven't paid the $100 developer fee and quite frankly I don't want to pay it just to find out IOS can't handle my game due to its complexity.
Does anyone have any experience with this? If Android requires a dual core is IOS more efficient in that it doesn't require a dual core? Or is it the opposite, IOS requires better hardware specs? Information like this is what I'm looking for.
If anyone is willing to share their personal experiences I'd love to hear them.
Thank you for reading.
AFAI$$anonymous$$ iPhones are POOPOO - Citation Needed
Answer by darthbator · Oct 23, 2013 at 11:02 PM
The S3 is a rough hardware equivalent to the iPhone 5. That Droid X2 is using the Tegra 2 chipset which I think is slightly less powerful then the A5 chip you'll find in the current ipod / iphone 4S. All apple processors after the A4 (iphone 4) are dual core chips btw.
In my experience apple's devices tend to perform slightly better then android devices generally considered to be "in the same class". I can't confidently say exactly why that is (they do their own in house processor design, could be that. Software is different, could be that. There's lots of differences. For example Android does all it's DVFS (CPU frequency scaling) in software, Apple's chips do this in hardware, that alone can make a difference in "on demand performance".
Thanks. I planned on targeting the 4s and up so that works out fine for me!
I would say if your S3 can run the game like a champ you should be good to go that's a pretty good target platform for mobile right now to make sure the game runs really smooth. Of course you should always try to optimize for slower phones, but I wouldn't sacrifice your game's quality to do so.
You never know though... there could be some things an Android device handles more poorly than iOS. For example, I just optimized a game to run its main loop at 10ms in the Editor (that's equivalent to 100fps). On an iPhone 4S I get a solid 60 fps. But on an LG GPad III I get varying between 52 to 58 fps. Odd no? The LG has an octa-core CPU and is way newer than the iPhone 4S. I suspect it's my use of distance fog. But still...
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