In my application I needed something like a particle system so I did the following:

While the application initializes I load a UIImage

laserImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"laser.png"];

UIImage *laserImage is declared in the Interface of my Controller. Now every time I need a new particle this code makes one:

    // add new Laserimage
UIImageView *newLaser = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:laserImage];
[newLaser setTag:[model.lasers count]-9];
[newLaser setBounds:CGRectMake(0, 0, 17, 1)];
[newLaser setOpaque:YES];

[self.view addSubview:newLaser];

[newLaser release];

Please notice that the images are only 17px * 1px small and model.lasers is a internal array to do all the calculating seperated from graphical output. So in my main drawing loop I set all the UIImageView's positions to the calculated positions in my model.lasers array:

    for (int i = 0; i < [model.lasers count]; i++) {
    [[self.view viewWithTag:i+10] setCenter:[[model.lasers objectAtIndex:i] pos]];
}

I incremented the tags by 10 because the default is 0 and I don't want to move all the views with the default tag.

So the animation looks fine with about 10 - 20 images but really gets slow when working with about 60 images. So my question is: Is there any way to optimize this without starting over in OpenGl ES?

Thank you very much and sorry for my english! Greetings from Germany, Thomas