I want to test my game's performance on roughly comparable hardware, as I develop it.

Then get an iPhone 3GS.  There is no such thing as “comparable hardware”.  Not even the iOS Simulator is comparable (its OpenGL ES 2 implementation is emulated in software, and provides no hardware support).  There are numerous hardware differences that matter, including deferred tile-based rendering which eliminates overdraw (your GeForce card will not perform this) and a unified memory model which eliminates bus transfers to the graphics card.
iOS devices have a virtual memory system but no paging system.
Even threading is not the same.

Both Mac OS X and iOS adopt a more asynchronous approach to the execution of concurrent tasks than is traditionally found in thread-based systems and applications.

The point is that the only hardware that is like an iPhone 3GS is an iPhone 3GS.  If you want to develop for one, get one.


L. Spiro

I want to test my game's performance on roughly comparable hardware, as I develop it.

Then get an iPhone 3GS.  There is no such thing as “comparable hardware”.  Not even the iOS Simulator is comparable (its OpenGL ES 2 implementation is emulated in software, and provides no hardware support).  There are numerous hardware differences that matter, including deferred tile-based rendering which eliminates overdraw (your GeForce card will not perform this) and a unified memory model which eliminates bus transfers to the graphics card.
iOS devices have a virtual memory system but no paging system.
Even threading is not the same.

Both Mac OS X and iOS adopt a more asynchronous approach to the execution of concurrent tasks than is traditionally found in thread-based systems and applications.

The point is that the only hardware that is like an iPhone 3GS is an iPhone 3GS.  If you want to develop for one, get one.


L. Spiro