The Real Performance Characteristics of Mobile Devices
summary
Mobile devices hit hard ceilings from power and thermal limits — e.g. iPhone 6s <4W vs laptop CPU ~50W + discrete GPU ~122W — so desktop-class graphics aren’t practical without heavy compromises. Tile-based GPUs (PowerVR) do hidden-surface removal but suffer expensive tile flushes and alpha/blend pitfalls; render-order changes can halve frame rate (30 → 15 on iPhone 4s). Real game case: Need for Speed targets 30fps with 100–1000 draws per frame, uses Havok, dynamic cube maps, and downloads quality presets. Draw calls reduced ~60% with Metal; Vulkan gives gains but drivers remain fragile.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 0:10What is this talk about?
- 1:39Introduction
- 7:20Building a game for mobile: the CPU
- 13:20Architectural Oddities
- 33:01Performance Enhancers
- 44:20Dialing it up to 11: High Performance APIs
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