ericjbasti Posted September 19, 2014 Share Posted September 19, 2014 (edited) Hello everyone, I'm sure a lot of you have seen this blog post from the makers of Construct (https://www.scirra.com/blog/150/html5-game-performance-on-ios-8) It has some really good information and shows just how powerful WebGL is. Great news all around. I didn't see it addressed in the article, nor have I seen anyone else talk about yet, but I'm seeing a drastic difference in performance between in Safari performance and 'web-app' performance (ie. save to home screen). I'm not sure if its just my device (iPhone 5s) or if its for everyone, but perhaps someone here could help verify my findings. Below are screenshots using Scirra's Space Blaster test. The first is when saved to the home screen to run as a web-app. The second is in Safari. Both ran for 1 minute with no other applications open. The web-app version only drops 4 frames during that entire minute and used a max cpu of 91%. The Safari version drops just about 1 frame a second and never gets beyond around 50% of the cpu. Safari seems to be caping the CPU usage (which I'm cool with, I don't need Canvas acting like Flash on the desktop), however I haven't seen this documented anywhere, and in the past the opposite was true. If you wanted full speed in iOS7, you had users run it from Safari not a web-app. This leads me to believe that for our games on iOS 8 we will actually want to get users out of Safari and into a web-app (I take that back, the sencha link from alex_h actually mentions a really serious bug with web-apps). Even for webGL. (note: at the time of both screenshots the fps reads 60fps, but I actually noticed it jump down to 48 quite a few times in Safari.) Edited September 19, 2014 by ericjbasti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_h Posted September 19, 2014 Share Posted September 19, 2014 There's some info relating to web-apps in the 'bugs' section of this sencha article: http://www.sencha.com/blog/apple-shows-love-for-html5-with-ios-8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ericjbasti Posted September 19, 2014 Author Share Posted September 19, 2014 Thanks for the link. That web-app timing bug is a killer. Still didn't see anything about performance differences between in Safari and in web-app. I'm sure most won't notice since webGL is such an improvement. Oddly enough I've seen people complaining about some native games and apps getting choppy with iOS8 (even OS transitions between apps). Definitely some performance issues going on with 8 right now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_h Posted September 19, 2014 Share Posted September 19, 2014 Yeah, there seem to be a lot of changes that have gone on under the hood. We've seen examples of code that ran at 60fps on iOS 7.1 but dropped to 30fps running on iOS8 with identical hardware. In this instance it turned out to be down to the developers having made use of a css transform3d hack to try to force hardware acceleration, iOS8 doesn't seem to like this any more! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
[email protected] Posted September 19, 2014 Share Posted September 19, 2014 works really well on my 4s / ios8. less frames dropped though launching from the home screen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ericjbasti Posted September 20, 2014 Author Share Posted September 20, 2014 Yeah it seems webGL is able to mask a lot of the issue. But for those of us still using the 2d-context the performance change can be quite concerning. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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