guiTextures and cost of drawcalls - how much is too much?

Questions & Answers
1

Hi!

My iPad app, a musical instrument/game, displays lots of guiTextures, resulting in 124 drawcalls. It still runs at a (nearly) steady 30 fps, and I’m adding to that custom particle effects (using Vectrosity) : hundreds of points(with alpha), still running smoothly.

So, how much is too much? And what’s the real cpu cost of these drawcalls?

Thanks for your insights!

2

It depends on the power of the mobile device. On some devices 124 drawcalls could be too much.

For mobile devices it’s better to use something like SpriteManager or buy EZGUI. Both do the same and pack all sprites / GUI elements into one mesh so the whole GUI needs just one drawcall. However the spritemanager just displays the sprites. There are no gui “events” like click / mouseenter / mouseexit.

I never used EZGUI but i guess they implemented such an interface so you can directly use it for your GUI.