Best way to draw/render grid iOS - Game of Life

Question

I am taking a stab at John Conway's game of life [wiki] & [demo] . I have developed a small program in C to calculate the next state - using a 1D array (but with 2D array logic).

I am hoping to make a small iOS app out of this (to Objective-C!), and am wondering the best and fastest way to render a grid like seen in the video. Note, it would have to render every fraction of a second and would use an array of 1 's and 0 's to determine a "block's" respective colour.

Edit: I'm probably looking at around 10 frames/sec, but a very large grid. It'd be rendering out hundreds of thousands of squares. Of course, if this isn't physically possible with iPhone/iPad technology then I'll reduce the grid size. It is variable without issue, just looks more 'epic' on a grand scale.

Any suggestions will help out, never touched anything of this manner before.

Answer 1

The best way depends on your criteria. Fastest would probably be to use OpenGL. You might even be able to write a shader to do the entire simulation. However, OpenGL is hard. Really hard.

I suspect that using Core Graphics and implementing code in a view's drawRect method that renders the array of cells onto the screen would be fast enough. It depends on how many cells you have and how many frames/second you want to draw.