OpenGL ES Extensions on the iPhone

I was recently re-reading Brian Greenstone's excellent (if slightly dated) Pangea Software's Ultiamte Game Programming Guide for Mac OS X (which is now available as a free download), and was wondering if I could use one of the optimizations Brian talked about in his book: vertex array ranges.

Brian Greenstone, if you don't know, has been writing games for years, starting on the Apple //gs, if I remember correctly, then moving to the Mac, then later the iPhone. He knows probably better than any living person - at very least any living person outside of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA - how to get the best 3D performance out of Apple hardware, so if he suggests something, it's a good idea to listen.

To discover whether Vertex Array Ranges were supported, I used the following code:

    NSString *extensionString = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:(char *)glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS)];
    NSArray *extensions = [extensionString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]];
    for (NSString *oneExtension in extensions)
        NSLog(oneExtension);

Which simply dumps a list of the OpenGL extensions supported by the device to the console. Here is the list I get when running on my first generation iPhone (Note: running against the simulator will give you a slightly different list):

 GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic
 GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias
 GL_IMG_read_format
 GL_IMG_texture_compression_pvrtc
 GL_IMG_texture_format_BGRA8888
 GL_OES_blend_subtract
 GL_OES_compressed_paletted_texture
 GL_OES_depth24
 GL_OES_draw_texture
 GL_OES_framebuffer_object
 GL_OES_mapbuffer
 GL_OES_matrix_palette
 GL_OES_point_size_array
 GL_OES_point_sprite
 GL_OES_read_format
 GL_OES_rgb8_rgba8
 GL_OES_texture_mirrored_repeat

Unless I'm reading it wrong, it looks like vertex array ranges are not supported on the iPhone.

Let's hope Brian decides to write an iPhone Ultimate Game Programming Guide.