Looking for a better benchmark, I asked my friend Guy English, an iOS developer who has worked on games like Tap Tap Revenge (as a contractor for Tapulous and Disney), to write a custom test app to measure an iPads graphics capabilities from the perspective of a game developer. Its a simple app that renders hundreds (or even a few thousand) sprites moving around on screen, with gravity, and tracking up to three touch points. The results show that the iPad 2s graphics improvements far outshine its straightforward CPU improvements exactly as Apple has advertised.
For example, on my original iPad, with 200 on-screen sprites, the framerate dropped to 45 fps. On the iPad 2, with 400 on-screen sprites, the framerate remained at 65 fps. On the iPad 1, Guys demo app dropped below 60 fps with about 100 animated sprites; on the iPad 2, it didnt drop below 60 fps until there were over 750 animated sprites.
After I showed him the results, Guy told me, The results show that the iPad 2 is easily about twice as powerful as the original and that this speed gain is a freebie you dont need to change your code structure in order to see significant gains. The differences in the amount of time spent rendering indicates that the GPU is really much faster than the original. The original iPad had a comparatively weak fill-rate and it was an issue for the device. The second generation really leaves that behind and it looks like itll be able to do some really incredible things graphically. My demo code is workman-like, competent code meant to measure the relative strengths of the parts of the system. Taking some time to get the most out of that GPU and CPU will pay off with some really remarkable games and graphics apps.
