I was wondering how well the iPad has shown itself to run since users have been playing around with it, as we are working on a rather big iPad project right now.
Essentially I had a moment of panic yesterday when I built the project for my iPhone 3GS just to test the speed. Unfortunately it runs like poop 
How well have your games been going? Does anyone have an idea of how much faster it is than the 3GS?
I have also heard about problems with fillrate. Is there a way to bypass this?
Thanks!
I’m doing some tests for an upcoming project right now, and from what I’ve observed the iPad is about 10% to 20% faster than a 3GS in most situations. There are times when goes drastically slower than a 3GS if there are lots of large alpha effects on screen, like Unity’s built-in fog effect.
I did a test the other day with these stats in the scene:
16 draw calls, 0 batched
32k polygons, 12.5k vertexes
15 textures (8.7mb)
8 skinned meshes, 85 bones each
Performance looked like this:
iPad: 33 to 35 FPS
iPhone 3GS: 25 to 27 FPS
iPod 2nd Gen: 23 to 25 FPS
Wow, thanks for the concise info!
Has anyone managed to get around that alpha problem yet?
there is no way to get around it.
The iPAd has the same graphic chip as the iphone 3GS, yet its screen is 5.2 times as large. As a consequence you only have 1/5.2 times the fillrate available that you had available on the 3GS if you draw the exactly same stuff again.
For this reason its crucial to cut ANY overdraw and optimize the things for the ipad. Alpha as Fog are the two obvious major problems here as they draw over an area already drawed and require the area behind to be drawed.
The only way to get around it is not using alpha unless its 100% required.
The advice is sound. To be clear, the ipad is just over twice as large with five times as many pixels.