Windows Phone 7 emulator/performance question

I'm waiting to get my phone unlocked by Microsoft so I can try my game on it. I have no idea how the compatibility or performance is.

So I'm just wondering about all that. How well does the emulator actually emulate the phone? If my game is running fine on the emulator without performance issues or graphical abnormalities and all I'm doing is rendering sprites on screen is it safe to assume it will work the same on the phone?

I'm actually very worried about performance and memory. I have a particle system I've made which is very simple, it just involves drawing sprites on scre开发者_开发问答en with varying levels of alpha, but that means I'm rendering tens of sprites, possibly hundreds, at the same time on screen.

---

The best thing you can do is test on device if you have performance concerns.

The emulator just runs a VM of the phone OS, utilising all available hardware. If you have a high spec machine, chances are your app could be humming along and on a device it might not.

Short of testing on a device the only thing I could suggest is keeping an eye out for performance do's and don'ts that might be posted around the place.

---

The issue I have found is that while the emulator does emulate the hardware it does not specify maximum requirements. What this means is your game may play well on a high end machine running the emulator it could stutter on the phone.

There isn't a lot you can do about this apart from wait for your phone to unlock and then test it. As a rule always try to optimise your performance as much as you can even if you feel you meet the minimum requirements.

One more note is if you go to geotrust's website there is a chatbox where you can have your application rushed through. I chatted to them the day I sent the verification email with my ID and it was verified 6 hours later.

---

In most of the cases, if an application runs well inside an emulator, then most likely it will work fine on the physical device.

The emulator is designed in a way so that even on powerful machines it tries to limit the performance to that of the phone. Of course, there are no absolute guarantees that the app will run flawlessly on the phone, but I wouldn't worry about that too much if I have a physical device to test on.

Generally, from what I see, in most cases there are no problems with the emulator/phone differences. There are some cases when graphics aren't displayed as needed on the phone and there might be some UI lags, but at the same time those work fine in the emulator. Once again, I wouldn't be concerned about this if there is a phone available.

---

I have a HTC Trophy, ie- relatively low-end first generation WP7 device. Even when running the emulator on an i7-930 with 16Gb RAM and Quadro 4000, running a simple tiled background with single animated sprite foreground, the performance when deployed to an actual device is WAY faster and smoother. I initially thought it might have something to do with running normally on the phone vs with debugging, intellitrace etc on the desktop but I think it's a bit of a stretch given how drastic the performance difference is.

If it runs fine on the emulator, you should have no problem with any commerical WP7 device out there... and available hardware will only get faster :)