Improve iPad performance?

I'm working on a 2D platform game.

Setup my profile on Phone Gap build, and I am building for android and iPad.

Testing on desktop obviously works 100%.

I assumed that due to my old android phone (Xpreia x10), it would be a good benchmark for low end android phones. So I got the game working on there, and it is decent, and playable.

Then when I run it on the iPad 2 its unbelievably slow! Something stupid like 2 fps.

I have 2 objects with physics.

A particle effect that fires at specific times, not continuously.

Also some parallax options on about 4 or 5 background layers.

Any ideas or suggestions to why it could be so slow on iPad, yet fine on my android phone. And then also, would it be better on an iPhone?

I have read through the tutorials on speeding up the games, pixel rounding, layer transparency.

Could the screen resolution, and image sizes also affect it?

I wanted to try out appMobi for the ipad build, but maybe someone has an idea if it will really improve performance?

Will "every tick" events impact performance a lot?

Thanks

"Every tick" events shouldn't be your problem, unless you are making the system to something crazy like generating a new world every tick! Try seeing if you can do without your physics... maybe a bullet movement would do the job? Sometimes physics can be very glitchy and laggy on a little processor like the one in an iPad. Also, I haven't really used app mobi yet, so I couldn't tell you, but I don't think it would make much of a difference.

How does the iPad 2 cpu (dual core) compare to the older X10 (single core)?

Is there another way to simulate gravity apart from physics?

Are you using the latest iOS 5? Versions before that are extremely slow.

If that doesn't fix it I would just wait until we introduce directCanvas. Even the latest iOS is very slow, and we can get around it by using a much faster renderer (directCanvas) which should fix most performance issues on mobile.

Hi Ash

Yea it is iOS 5.1 on the iPad 2.

I don't have an iPhone, but I am hoping that it will be fine on there.

I know you hate this question, but how long do you think it will be before you have directCanvas working? Estimate in months would be great.

Are you working on direct Canvas for appMobi only, or will it work on Phone Gap too?

Thanks

directCanvas will be appMobi only. I'm hoping it will be ready in a month or two, but it's complicated and could take longer.

Cool stuff :)

Now we hope that appMobi allows status bar removal, and then all will be good!