Quartz 2D vs OpenGL ES Learning Curve

Question

I have been developing iPhone Applications for a couple of months. I would like to know your views about the Quartz vs OpenGL ES 1.x or 2.0 learning curve. You can tell your per

Answer 1

Quartz 2D is not applicable for game development IMHO. It is a software rendering API. It won't give you realtime rendering speed. It's good for drawing charts or vector text with shadows, or for blending several images together. Just not for games. Unless you want to make a game where few images are moving against a monochrome background and even in that case I doubt it will be really smooth on older devices. I've seen some games obviously coded with Quartz. A pitiful sight.

Sooner or later you'll end up using Open GL ES or a game framework build on top of it. I recommend you to check cocos2D, SIO2 engine, or examples from SDK. With careful programming it is possible to make an Open GL ES game with parallax scrolling and relatively small amount of objects work at 60 FPS even on 2nd gen devices. Tiny Wings is an example of such game. And maintaining stable 30 FPS is not a problem at all.