Ouya 720p or lower for performance

Well I'm working on an Ouya game. I planned for 720p(1280, 960), I'm hoping that CocoonJS will be ready shortly after the release. However it's still mobile technology UIWebView on a Tegra 3. From this I'm concerned about performance.

I'm usually a bit of a minimalist for graphical scenes and don't do multi layer scrolling. I am however going to at time have around 40 to 80 moving objects and some Spriter based animations.

Up to 4 players consisting of 3 collision boxes and the spriter animation

20 to 30 fireballs max

20 enemies on screen max

10 moving platforms max

Based on say 100 moving objects a dozen collision checks do I need to be worried about performance.

And what it comes down to out of this. Should I lower the resolution to ensure a more consistent playable rate? Should I instead aim closer to

960, 480

640, 480

480, 320

Would using a lower resolution scaled up to Ouya or higher res output have better performance or would it make no difference since it needs to scale anyways?

I may be making the game for an aim on the Ouya, but I plan to get it onto other Android, IOS and PC's too.

I figure now before the content and levels are create to get this sorted out. I don't want to have to redesign 40+ levels down the road if I drop resolution :D

Lowering the screen resolution will only improve render performance, not logic performance. If your events are the bottleneck, you need to improve them, since reducing the screen resolution is unlikely to make it much faster.

If the rendering is the bottleneck, if you're using a hardware-accelerated technology like CocoonJS then it's probably limited by the hardware. In that case you'd just have to scale back the amount of drawing on the screen.

Thanks for the info. So as I understand

resolution will effect? affect? render performance. So on slower hardware or limited rendering ability a lower resolution is better. This is what I was looking for. i wasn't sure if the game being up scaled to full resolutions on mobile technologies(android, ios) would have an impact.

So assuming the logic is ok. I should lower resolution for speed performance. that's if I need it.

Ok thanks. I'll do some extra testing :)

One point I am confused on... 1280x960 = 720? I thought 1280x720 was 720p... that drops 240 rows of pixels off your project at 1280 each, that is quite a saving just by scaling from 960 down to 720 on your height...

I'm using Phonegap/Cordova(2.3.0) and I got some games that run 40FPS and others around 15FPS, it just depends on the size of the game and plugins/behaviors used.

BluePhaze, yes you are correct. My viewport is 720p, but my layout is is at 960. The reason for this is to be compatible later with iPad and less landscape. However this is not the point of the discussion :D My error was mostly just doing a quick check of the layout and not checking project. I usually don't remember these numbers at all. I figure a wiki look is fine :D

rfisher, ooh perfect person to talk too. As I'm focusing on the Ouya first what could you maybe test out a couple of experiments.

100 Bouncing balls(bullet)

1280 x 720

960 x 480

640 x 320? or is it 240?

and if 60fps can be maintained how many bouncing in the lower res can be done before hitting the performance of 1280 x 720.

If I had an ouya I would do these my self. I also wish CocoonJS would work :(

I personally don't mind running a game between 20-30fps, but I find C2 tends to fluxuate a lot due to the factors that bring the fps down to these levels. Often I find lower FPS is not the problem is the fluxuation :(

jayderyu

Get me a capx of the examples and i'll turn them into APK and install them on my OUYA. But I'm sure Ashley has already done this.

yeah, Ash does good performance testing. But I haven't seen an Ouya yet with the Tegra3. Though I suspect it will get apx the same performance as modern nexus devices with the same chip. I was reading Ash performance guide last night :)

Ok. I'll send a capx in a little while :)

Here is a simple demo game on the Ouya.

youtu.be/-fttoNDVn0Y

APK

that looks promising. Sorry for the late capx. been a bit busy :D

dl.dropbox.com/u/14087254/performancetest.capx

It constantly creates balls as along as the FPS is greater than 40. 40 being arbitrary for reasonable smoothness performance. The balls are 50% transparent to push accelerated canvas. There are of course a lot of other effects that could be added, but I thought this was simple.

It also has a current ball count. i find that once and a awhile performance improves for a bit or dips that effects the ball count.

I'm hoping for 100 objects at 40fps running at 720p :)

and rfisher thanks for all the testing. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on mine come March or April.