Performance of emulator vs watch hardware

Hi all,

I’m developing a watch face. It has a rendering pipeline that’s somewhat elaborate so I’m keeping an eye on the performance.

Since I don’t have a physical watch (it’s a Pebble Round 2 on pre-order…) I’m developing in the emulator. However I understand that the emulator is likely somewhat faster than the actual watch.

I don’t want to be in a position where my watch face works great on the emulator, but is too slow to be practical in real life (or takes up too much battery).

Is there a general ballpark figure of how much faster the emulator is? For example, if this was Linux, I’d just cat /proc/cpuinfo and look for the BogoMips. Which is not accurate at all, but does give me a high-level picture, which is all I need right now.

Or, is there a way to run the emulator at actual hardware speed, like a retro console emulator?

Cheers!

1 Like

if you post your PBW here I can try it on real PR2 hardware and you could compare to the emulator!

Thece’s not, unfortunately. That would be really nice.

If it’s lagging even a little in the emulator it will definitely lag on real hardware. But the amount of slowdown really depends on what’s hogging the CPU so it’s a little hard to tell for sure

Thanks @eric, may take you up on that some time.

Is there a rule of thumb for what kind of performance or “energy budget” is acceptable?

Like, for a watch face that updates once per minute: I guess 5 milliseconds is entirely OK, and 5 seconds is going to kill the battery… is 50 milliseconds too much? 500 milliseconds? (assuming it’s maxing out the CPU for the duration)

If you’re optimizing for reduced power consumption, then we recommend updating once a minute. CPU is directly correlated to battery usage.