TL;DR - for my Metal particles project, the iPad Pro is about 50% faster than the Air 2
My shiny new iPad Pro has just arrived and, of course, the very first thing I did was install my ParticleLab application on it to check Metal performance. I've created a new demo mode which also includes two post-processing Metal Performance Shaders: MPSImageGaussianBlur and MPSImageAreaMin to give a nice nebulous effect.
Performance is impressive, especially running these filters at 1366 x 1024 pixels. My iPad Air 2 runs this at 20fps, my iPhone 6s at just under 25fps and the iPad Pro around 30fps. However, running these particles on that massive monitor looks gorgeous!
If you want to try yourself, the project is available my GutHub repository here, enjoy!
There's obviously an overhead in using the Metal Performance Shaders for a post-processing step, so here's another screen recording of my app calculating and rendering 16.7 million particles at around 20fps and targeting a texture of 960 x 510 pixels:
Not quite as pretty, but amazingly fast (and still around 50% faster than my iPad Air 2).
The first real app I've installed is my very own Nodality and the additional real estate of the Pro makes using it an absolute pleasure. I'm in the process of reengineering Nodality from the ground up and hope to have a new version, with Pencil support, out in the first few weeks of 2016.
In the meantime, here's a photo of Nodality in its natural home!
