Extrapolating performance on cheaper devices

Question

I am in the final stages of developing a game with XNA and MonoGame and am planning to release it on Windows Phone and Android. I personally have a Blu Win HD LTE and my father and sister have a Nexus 5 and Moto e, respectively.

I am testing on all of these devices. What I am unsure of is how to extrapolate what the performance will be on cheaper devices, like a Lumia 630. I already can use profiling on my phone to make sure I'm under the 185MB memory limit, but I'm not sure what the framerate/performance will be.

I am looking for a way to roughly estimate how much slower the performance will be based on some variable (processor speed, GPU model, number of cores, etc.), such that I can tune performance on my current device and be assured of performance on cheaper devices. Has anyone tried this?

Answer 1

The only reliable option is to test on the actual devices you care about, or at least devices with the same GPU / CPU. This can get expensive though.

The easiest option is to let your users tell you what the performance is like on slower devices. You could give away a few beta copies to people with different hardware and ask them for feedback. You could also expose some configuration settings for them, so they can trade off performance and rendering quality.

Having said that, there are some things you can do to improve your guesses as to how it will perform.

To start with you need to do some detailed profiling to work out if you're CPU or GPU limited on performance. The limiting factor can guide your guesses about other devices.

For example how many CPU threads are doing work when your game is running? If you only use one or two threads it doesn't matter how many CPU cores are available.

Once you understand your performance, you can find some GPU and CPU benchmarks that have been run on both the devices you know about, and the ones you're interested in. Based on those benchmark results, and what you know about how your game uses the CPU and GPU you can estimate how fast it will run on the other hardware.