Enlighten iPad 2 performance problems

We are getting 26 FPS with the standard shader with a normal map and a specular color on iPad 2. No scripts are running, and we have set everything to static. Would someone mind telling me what the absolute fastest settings are in order to also achieve bumped specular? There aren't docs yet (that I have found) that discusses the bake settings.

Note: We were able to hit 51 FPS for the same environment with bumped specular with directional lightmaps in Unity 4.

 

I suspect the fastest settings would be the same as before... 'GI Workflow: Legacy'. I'm not expecting any of the shiny new rendering features to be usable in real-world mobile games for at least a couple of years yet, as for now, we all need to support at least the iPhone 4S/iPad 2, if not even slower devices. There's a huge difference between a tech demo on a top-end device and a real-world game.

Even in a couple of years, we may still be using baked lighting/light probes, as the rapid improvements in mobile device performance now seem to be slowing down, with the iPhone 6 not really a whole lot faster than the 5S, for example.

But is the 'Legacy' workflow actually going to remain in Unity 5, or is it getting removed?...

(There's other things marked as 'legacy' - such as the old vertex lighting path - that seem likely to be removed)

 

the legacy [Beast] lightmapper will be removed in final 5.0 version.

 

On second review of the play, lightmapping just doesn't appear to work on our iPad 2. I have to be screwing something up.

 

They are still selling the original iPad mini which is basically an iPad 2, seems this generation won't vanish within the next 11 months.
But the iPad Air 2 got much faster, I think the 6S will be a real speed bump again. I doubt the speed of improvements of mobile performance will slow down quickly. Especially not when you think of the new (basically free) real time ray tracing features of the next PowerVR generations. This should dramatically improve visual appearance of mobile games but it will lead to a totally new problem with a huge gap between existing mobile generations on the market.

 

It really shouldn't make that much difference if you bake the scene, make sure all your performance settings are correct and you are using the same rendering path. Also make sure you are actually baking, not semi-baking by selecting the correct light properties (static only)..

 

After poking around in the shaders it appears that everything shader model 2 is still very much a work in progress. (Lot's of TODO's and even some questions in the comments.) I guess I'll wait for the next beta.