Chipset, CPU and GPU combination

[Yashash]

We all know that people are playing our games more on mobile than ever before. One of the primary benefits of HTML5 is that it can be played on the go without downloading heavy apps - this, by default, makes the developing economies our target audience.

 

We are building an marketplace app for HTML5 games and are starting with the huge audience base of India. Here's my question:

 

1. What is the most influential factor for HTML5 game performance - Chipset, CPU or GPU?

2. In each of those categories, which are the best builds for smooth game performance?

[tips4design]

Well, it all depends on your game. If your game doesn't use the GPU then the GPU is not relevant at all for the game performance. Also, if the game does too much processing (like physics, simulations, etc...) then it does not matter if the user  has a good GPU if the CPU can't keep up.

 

Doing HTMl5 game dev I think the second question makes no sense. The idea of creating a HTML5 game is that you don't really care about hardware, HTML5 game dev being very high-level.

 One of the primary benefits of HTML5 is that it can be played on the go without downloading heavy apps

This is not always true. Apart from the fact that the user has to download your app every time he tries to use it, it is by no means smaller than a native app. Also, when devs talk about HTML5 games on mobile, in general, they are not referring to games played inside the device's browser, but about native apps that have to be downloaded from the marketplace, but apps that have been created using HTML5 technologies (eg: not done directly in Xcode in C).

 

So, when creating HTML5 games for low end devices you are not really talking about HTML5 games (most probably because your game won't have a canvas, as low end devices either don't support it or can't re-draw it at 60fps). Some browser-playable games for low-end devices could be created in plain old HTML & JavaScript by displaying (and maybe animating) DOM elements. Move a square div in a page will certainly be faster than clearing the entire canvas and drawing again the square at the new position.

 

Coming back to your second question, best builds for HTML5 game dev are usually the same best builds that score high in (native) benchmarks.