iOS: image drawing performance

I have several fundamental questions to clearify to myself, hope you'll help...

I'm developing a game application. It开发者_JAVA百科 has game loop and on each iteration i draw about 200 sprites. What is the fastest way of drawing bitmap? Currently I use [UIImage drawAtPoint] method to draw a sprite (sprite sizes can be 16x16 ... 64x64), but something tells me, this is not the best approach. As I understand, UIImage is based on Quartz technology? Can cocos2d provide the better performance? I also thought about using OpenGL ES to reproduce drawing mechanism via textured objects.

If you're making a game you'll probably want to avoid Quartz/UIKit/CoreAnimation. They're designed to be simple and easy to use, at the cost of performance.

Opengl is the fastest way to draw sprites to the screen on the iPhone. There are two versions of Opengl in iOS: OpenglES 1.1 and OpenglES 2.0. If you're looking to support the iphone 3G and earlier, you'll need to either use 1.1 exclusively, or be able to determine the device you're running on and switch versions on the fly. Opengl is very fast but at the cost of a fairly steep learning curve and a lot of what you'd see as boilerplate code.

Cocos2d is an iOS game engine built on top of Opengl. It's designed to make using opengl easier (among many other things). If you're making a game, I'd suggest you use cocos2d as they've done a lot of the hard work already. If you don't you'll be spending 99% of your time getting opengl to work, rather than focusing on the game.

Good luck! :)