I took Mike Ash’s performance measuring code from 2008 with the improvements made by Stuart Carnie in early 2010 and turned that into a performance measuring project for 2012.
I know it’s still 2011, consider this a forward-looking statement. In any case, the test project is available for download, ready to run, includes Cocos2D v1.0.1 and is relatively easy to modify for your own needs. This project is also available on my github repository where I host all of the iDevBlogADay source code.
Since numbers are so dry and hard to assess, you’ll find the rest of this post garnered with charts and conclusions based on the results obtained from iPhone 3G, iPod 4 and iPad.
While writing the Learn Cocos2D book I was surprised to find that Cocos2D’s CCSpriteBatchNode was only able to increase the performance of several hundred bullet sprites on screen by about 10-15% (20 to 22.5 fps). I wanted to re-visit that scenario for a long time because as far as I understood, the more sprites I was drawing the greater the impact of CCSpriteBatchNode should be.
But even Cocos2D’s own sprite performance tests (compare columns 9 and 10) revealed a performance difference of under 20% (39 to 42 fps). It’s only when all sprites are scaled and rotated, or most of them are outside the screen area, that sprite batching seems to have a bigger impact (25 to 60 fps). Surely that scenario is not applicable to most games. So I started investigating.
