On the IOS platform:
The HTML5 canvas element is not hardware accelerated. CSS3 3D Transforms (example: translate3d) are hardware accelerated.
Looking to create a 2d game for IOS using HTML/JavaScript with PhoneGap, should I consider using just the DOM with CSS3?
Has anyone tried this? Are there any benchmarks?
I also had this concern when building my own 2D game. I initially had problems with animation performance on iOS but I solved it with CSS3 3D transformations. I didn’t try Canvas but I really didn’t need to once the proper CSS was applied. And the performance remained good with PhoneGap under both iOS and Android versions. Some older Android devices are somewhat slow but I don’t think Canvas would help with that either.
As for benchmarking, I did find this which shows both Canvas and CSS3 transitions with images: http://www.spielzeugz.de/html5/compare/