Cycles Per Vertex

This counter represents the average number of clock cycles that the Shader Engine has spent processing vertices.

A high value indicates that the average cost of shading a vertex is high.

If this value is high, then you could batch process your application's vertex shaders with the appropriate offline profiling compiler in the PowerVR SDK using the -perfsim flag to identify the most expensive one in your scene, which will help you find the best place to focus your optimisation.