working on our HD version of Dungeon Crawlers and we ran into a snafu while building for the iPad 3.
first off - we are still developing on 3.4, because our game launched so close to the release of 3.5 we didn’t want to risk it.
However, in it’s current state, Dungeon Crawlers can run with Bump Mapping, Forward Rendering, Lights up the wazoo, and 2 Pixel Lights (Good Quality Mode) on an iPad 2. It does not run this well on an iPad 3. I realize the fill rate issue, but i also think this shouldn’t be an issue because of the 4-core GPU on the iPad 3 (Example: Real Racing 2 is running 4x AA on an iPad 3).
So the question is - does Unity 3.5 have this support? I read that it does multi-core support but only for Windows/Mac/Xbox. Has anyone been experimenting with it? We want to update this weekend, but we were hoping to get an answer to this question before moving forward.
I’m also curious to know about this question, and whether or not we can support the native res, since our title runs with super simple shaders and minus cars there’s really no dynamic lighting anyway. Our interface is also resolution independent…
I’m curious about this too. I’m not necessarily surprised that a portable device isn’t pushing 1080p+ graphics without a sweat, but it’d be nice to know whether or not Unity can get the most out of it.
Well I can tell you right now that even in 3.4, our game, which pushes a lot of poly’s, but has all the lights turned off and uses light mapping, has no problem running in native 2048x1536 with 4x AA. The issue we run into is when we turn on dynamic lighting and bump mapping. Works great on an iPad 2, and not great at all on an iPad 3.
Interested as well. I suspect it is a pixel shader issue. Looks like that we in actual fact need to optimise heavily for ipad3, and ignore ipad2 as a “it just works fine” platform, as it can’t possibly be slower at this point.
From what I understand about forward rendering is: the moment you introduce more than one light of any kind, you redraw everything that 2nd light hits again. That’s got to hurt. So light probes are probably going to be mandatory for any kind of multiple light set up on these insane resolutions.
You guys try probes instead of “real lights” - any difference with a quick test job?
Interested to see how this discussion pans out. We haven’t got our iPad3 yet. Would one of you guys be kind enough to test my app physynth out? I compiled it against “HD/native” setting so I’m hoping it doesn’t actually run like a total brick. I have a promo code if anyone with a new iPad would be kind enough to give it a pop.
Quick question: does HD work alright in 3.4 on iPad3 - ie “it just works” ?
I’m not a Unity dev yet as I’m still evaluating the product but I do have an iPad 3 (64gb/4g ver.). I could test out your app for you. Just let me know if there is anything specific you want me to look for.
Not sure if it helps but I was able to run Angry Bots and Samurai 2 Dojo without any problems. Didn’t notice any issues. I quickly checked them out to see how they performed/looked to aid in evaluating Unity, but I wasn’t super thorough.
In my opinion the quad cores of the pad3 gpu are used regardless the software “supports it” or not.
Is not a quad core CPU, which requires 64bit and multi core management, is a GPU, I don’t think anything must be done by devs to gain the advantage it brings in.
People are totally overreacting or are just forgetting trivialities
The iPad 2 was already a multicore gpu (2 cores) and the iPad3 just has a second instance of this same gpu present
Engines can not decide to use or not to use the multicore gpu, its always there and always works in parallel without extra effort or overhead.
This is because the gpu architecture has really nothing to do with multicore gpu as you know it from desktop.
The PowerVR SGX are tile based, which means that the sceen is drawn as collection of rectangles by the gpu. Similar to how 3D rendering software operates
With the multicore gpu, the only change to the single core setup is that each tile is rendered by a different gpu.
In the end this means that to the system, it still behaves like a single gpu
Every single software just makes use of all gpus, if it wants or not does not matter
Mainly because the GPU only got 2 more cores (close to 2X performance gain for a powerVR SGX most of the time) and you got 4 time the pixel, if you game was heavy on pixel processing you won’t be able to have the same graphical performance. I think they are right when they expect game to render at a lower resolution on the ipad 3 and upscale after.
i have no issues running the game at 60fps running at 2048x1536. But we are also trying to push the boundaries a little and add dynamic lighting and bump mapping. Looks like the system can handle about 10-15 lights before its starts to bog down. So we’ve decided to go with a hybrid lightmap-dynamic light approach that reduces the number of active lights to that number. Looks really good! Excited to get this update out.
