"advice on speeding up opengl es 1.1 on the iphone" Code Answer

with a tiler utilization still above 90%, you’re likely still vertex throughput-bound. your renderer utilization is higher because the gpu is rendering more frames. if your primary focus is improving performance on older devices, then the key is still to cut down on the amount of vertex data needed per triangle. there are two sides to this:

reducing the amount of data per vertex: now that all of your vertex attributes are already gl_shorts, the next thing to pursue is finding a way to do what you want using fewer attributes or components. for example, if you can live without specular highlights, using dot3 lighting instead of opengl es fixed-function lighting would replace your 3 shorts (+ 1 short of padding) for normals with 2 shorts for an extra texture coordinate. as an additional bonus, you’d be able to light your models per-pixel.

reducing the number of vertices needed per triangle: when drawing with indexed triangles, you should make sure that your indices are sorted for maximum reuse. running your geometry through imagination technologies’ pvrttristrip tool would probably be your best bet here.

By Cristiano Nicolai on October 7 2022