iPad vs. Android - Performance of app during lap analysis

[schluerfi1978]

Hey there,

I'm using HLT Grand Prix on iPad 3 as well as HLT Petrolhead on Android Sony Xperia S. Last weekend, I recorded a few laps on the Nordschleife with 5 Hz GPS and 1 Hz OBD on Android. Afterwards, I transferred them to the iPad via Dropbox to do laptime analysis on the bigger screen.

What I realized is that the iOS version runs much less smoothly than the Android version when I scrolled through the different diagrams. Especially zooming and switching from diagram to diagram is very laggy on the iOS version. This was quite surprising to me, since I always considered the Xperia S as a rather low-end phone and the iPad as a rather high-end piece of hardware.

Did anybody else realized the same before? Is there anything I can do to improve the performance on the iPad, except closing all other apps before using HLT (which didn't seem to help very much)?

Best regards,
Michael

[Harry]

In terms of processing power, the iPad3 has a MultiCore Geekbench benchmark of 492 and the Sony Xperia S one of 1205. So a clear advantage on the Sony side. Not sure how the benchmark is exactly calculated (raw CPU processing vs. app level) but Android is more demanding for the processor than iOS. So more processing power is needed for Android devices to produce the same results on app level / user experience. This will probably make the gap less big than it seems at first.

The rending complexity will be higher on the iPad side: while the iPad3 comes at a 2048 x 1536 resolution, the Xperia has 1280 x 720 only. As graphic rendering is hardware supported on iOS while it needs to be disabled for the Android charts to allow e.g. dotted lines, this aspect is probably not relevant or even in favor of the iPad.

This is a complex topic, but looking into the above points, your observation is most probably what needs to be expected.

- Harry

[Harry]

P.S. The iPad3 had no advantage on the CPU side comparing it to the iPad2. Opposed to this, the latest iPad Air come with a benchmark of 2499 - which is more than 5 times as fast as the iPad2/3.

[schluerfi1978]

Very interesting!

By the way, I have some old Nordschleife laps with 1 Hz GPS + 1 Hz OBD. I can analyse them without the large lag, so the lag is correlated to the number of data points.

Any chance to get this lack of power of older iOS devices addressed in future iOS builds of HLT? For example, by creating a 1-Hz-copy of the lap. This 1 Hz copy is used as a preview for the "no-zoom"-helicopter view of the diagrams; when you zoom in and only a fraction of the total data points needs to be displayed, the app switches to the high-Hz original data file and gives the user the full data resolution in the zoom-view. Or by giving the user a manual option to reduce Hz and thus number of data points if they experience problems.

[Harry]

or buy a new iPad

[schluerfi1978]

iPad? I thought Android is the high-performance hardware?

[Harry]

No, definitively not.

- Harry