Particle effects are very easy to use performance killers. Here are a few suggestions:
- Reduce the number of particles. Usually one is tempted to start out with far too many particles. Anything above 100 should make you feel uneasy, anything above 250 should cause a mild panic attack.
- Multiple particle effects running at the same time multiply the number of particles. 10 particle effects with 100 particles are just as bad performance-wise as a single particle effect with 1000 particles.
- Don't use overly large textures. Most particles look fine with a 64x64 texture or even less.
- There's no real need to provide a -hd version of the particle effect. Particles get scaled up on Retina devices and look the same automatically. The only benefit from using -hd particles is using higher resolution textures, which in 99% won't make any visual difference on Retina devices. This is because most particle effects are somewhat blurry in nature to begin with.
- Particle batching only improves performance if you add multiple particle effects (using the same texture) to the same particle batch node.