Using vectors in iOS

I'm working on a simple iOS game that's always drawing 5 to 10 layers of 32bit png images which requires enough memory to crash on the ipod touch 4g when retina enabled. On other devices it works just fine. I'm not even getting memory warnings. So I was trying with lower quality images, like RGB5_A1 format, but it looks really bad because I need alpha transparency and lots of gradients.

Since all the images are exports from Illustrator I was thinking that maybe i could just export a vec开发者_Go百科tor image and draw in on iOS. From what i was researching hardly anyone tried this and the only option I've come across was to implement a SVG parser for Quartz.

Did I miss anything? Also I'm worried about performance, but I couldn't find any benchmarks.

Without knowing specifics of your game, I'm going to make a few assumptions based on normal use...

You are not going to want to use straight vector graphics for this. Stick with your raster graphics.

If you are talking about 32 bit color space for your PNG images, then you need to scale back. iOS uses 24 bit images and that includes 8 bits each for red, green, blue, and alpha. As it stands, you have an extra byte for every pixel shown.

If you are using Adobe products, import the Illustrator file into Photoshop and use the "Save for Web..." option. Choose PNG-24 and you'll be all set.