[ender7]

I don't really have an opinion on Windows vs. OS X, but I have been extremely impressed with iOS's graphical performance.

It's not just that they have good framerate - even Android can get good average framerate. The amazing thing about iOS that it gets amazing maximum frame delay, i.e. the space between frames is almost never more than 33ms (~30fps). On Android you frequently run into tiny little hiccups in frame delay that might not impact its measured FPS, but are certainly noticeable to the human eye. The result is that it just doesn't feel as smooth.

I don't know how Apple achieved this. It's certainly not perfect - you can occasionally get an iDevice to freeze for a few hundred milliseconds, but those are very rare occurrences. It's as if they have a real-time guarantee built into the system, but I don't think they actually have one. Which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

[zokier]

This is why good game hardware (CPU/GPU) benchmarks measure minimum framerate in addition to average. There was some site that measured 99th percentile framerates too, which seemed like a good idea.

edit: Example of better measurements: http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6 Notice how Radeons have lower avg fps but the framerate seems more stable.