I have a 3D game world on an iPhone (limited graphics speed), and I'm already regulating whether I draw each shape on the screen based on it's size and distance from the camera. Something like...

if (how_big_it_looks_from_the_camera > constant) then draw

What I want to do now is also take into account how many shapes are being drawn, so that in busier areas of the game world I can draw less than I otherwise would.

I tried to do this by dividing how_big_it_looks by the number of shapes that were drawn last frame (well, the square root of this but I'm simplifying - the problem is the same).

if (how_big_it_looks / shapes_drawn > constant2) then draw

But the check happens at the level of objects which represent many drawn shapes, and if an object containing many shapes is switched on, it increases shapes_drawn lots and switches itself back off the next frame. It flickers on and off.

I tried keeping a kind of weighted average of previous values, by each frame doing something like shapes_drawn_recently = 0.9 * shapes_drawn_recently + 0.1 * shapes_just_drawn, but of course it only slows the flickering down because of the nature of the feedback loop.

Is there a good way of solving this?

My project is in Objective-C, but a general algorithm or pseudo-code is good too.

Thanks.