I am planning to buy an iTouch and mac mini to test my game. I would like for it to run smoothly without any problems on ALL generations of iphone, itouch, and ipad. My main concern is the itouch/iphone 1st and 2nd gen - how powerful are they? I currently have a huge level built with over 6000 vertices (this is without characters, textures, and objects - I basically just have the terrain set up.) According to stats, I have 10 draw calls, 11.3k tris, and 6.2k verts. Would this run easily on all versions of the itouch/iphone? What vertex limit should I stay under for models? Which generation of an iTouch should I purchase for testing?
the first gen is good for 2D games - nuff said. Throwing quads around the screen like zombieville etc. Thats as good it gets. It will slow down just doing that. As for the draw calls - those are fine. I would estimate a 15fps framerate at a guess. It would also NOT run anything with shaders. Pure fixed function.
Verts aren’t the problem. Fill rate and memory bandwidth is awful, and you’ll hit those (and cpu limits) before you hit a vertex limit (which is technically a CPU limit I guess since that hardware doesn’t support VBO in hardware as far as I remember so you end up just uploading meshes to the card each frame regardless). At least VBA was the only thing it supported back when I developed for it.
In english: it will run if you don’t use any surface shaders or opengl ES 2.0. It won’t run well at all, but it will run. Just decide if its worth crippling your 3D game for that minority device.