Best Practices for Optimal Performance¶

1 - Keeping Your Device Cool¶

In order for your device to perform at its best, it is crucial that the components inside your device are kept at a reasonable temperature. Overheating may cause your gameplay to experience stuttering, dropped frames, and most critically, dropped inputs.

1.1 - Charging¶

It is generally not recommended to keep your device plugged in while playing rhythm games. Keeping it plugged in to a charger may result in excessive heat generation from the battery, which may affect your device's ability to properly capture touch input.

Charging your device while playing rhythm games will also accelerate battery degradation, which may also affect overall device performance and battery life over time.

It is recommended to have your device moderately or fully charged before entering a rhythm game session. If you must plug in your device due to critically low battery or poor battery health, consider using a lower wattage power adapter (20 watts or less). Genuine Apple power adapters are strongly recommended. Depending on when you bought your iPad, Apple will generally include a 20 watt power adapter in the device's original packaging. If you misplaced it, you can purchase a new one here.

1.2 - Gameplay Environment¶

To prevent your device from overheating, it is highly recommended to play on a hard surface, such as a table tor desk, as opposed to a soft surface, such as a pillow or bed. While mobile devices are designed to run cooler than laptops on the same surfaces, it is ideal to give your mobile devices as much breathing room as possible, especially for the purpose of rhythm games.

2 - Making Rhythm Games the Top Priority in Software¶

To make sure your device does not experience random stuttering and frame drops, it is recommended to take some time to do some maintenance.

2.1 - Clearing Applications in the App Switcher¶

Clearing applications from the App Switcher removes the application from memory, leaving more resources for your game.

Note

The usefulness of clearing applications from memory is disputed, with users often stating that applications are fine being left uncleared for faster launching. For devices with a limited memory budget however (4GBs or less), clearing applications from the App Switcher may be more beneficial than not, as limited memory capacity could cause a rhythm game to crash.

Repeatedly entering and exiting a rhythm game, or having another active application outputting audio, may cause a rhythm game's audio to sound distorted and out of sync during gameplay. It is recommended to clear all applications from the App Switcher occasionally to prevent audio desync.

Image text — Clearing applications from the iPadOS App Switcher

2.2 - Preventing Background Tasks¶

Depending on the application, there is a possibility of its services running rogue while you are playing a rhythm game. To prevent applications from running in the background, you can turn off Backgroud App Refresh in the Settings app. Turning off Background App Refresh may help improve performance and according to Apple, may help preserve battery life. It can be turned off entirely, or you can choose which applications are allowed to run in the background based on your needs.

2.3 - Freeing Up Space¶

Freeing up your device storage prevents random game slowdowns. A storage at full or near-full capacity prevents your device from caching data, which causes the device to take up background resources to clear up space. Performance of games and overall device smoothness is diminished as a result. Aim to have at least 10GBs of free storage on your device. Check storage management for ways to free up storage space.