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Say I have two non-opaque images of the same size and format on the same background view, one with only four corners being transparent, and the other with four corners and a center hole being transparent. Will there be any rendering performance differences when doing color blending for these two images and the background view?

More generally, if a image is non-opaque — so color blending will happen whether it is wholly transparent or only partially transparent — does the number of transparent areas and the sizes of these areas matter in the blending performance?

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Well, yes...there will be a performance difference. The question in this case is will it be big enough for you to notice? Probably not. Any time you have an image that is not opaque, the rendering engine must then calculate per pixel what color to render the layers underneath that image. The more non-opaque pixels you have, the more times this calculation needs to happen. However, iOS is blazingly fast at single-precision floating point calculations (as of armv7 architecture) so unless you are layering tons of images, you are not likely to notice the difference.

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