Google I/O 2011: Accelerated Android Rendering

Romain Guy, Chet Haase

Android 3.0 introduced a new hardware accelerated 2D rendering pipeline. In this talk, you will be introduced to the overall graphics architecture of the Android platform and get acquainted with the various rendering APIs at your disposal. You will learn how to choose the one that best fits your application. This talk will also deliver tips and tricks on how to use the new hardware accelerated pipeline to its full potential.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[JayBomb999]

Romain's attitude toward hardware acceleration has been frustrating for quite a long time. It really amazes me that a smooth, lag-free UI seems to be so low on the Android team's list of priorities.

[KingKhain]

Did he just imply in the beginning that since multi-cores CPU's are coming we don't need GPU acceleration for phones, but just for tablets?

Just because the CPU can handle the UI now doesn't mean it can do it in an efficient way! The GPU can do it more efficiently, otherwise you wouldn't need it for tablets, either. And by the way, Android phones are not just in the high-end....There will be 600-1000 Mhz phones for years as they get into under $100 price ranges. Will they get laggy phones?

[Achwaq Khalid]

@romainguy & @chethaase Hardware Acceleration is always welcomed whether the CPU is strong or not, think about the battery life, the CPU will always find something else to play with.

[justinhforsyth]

That kind of kills the idea of true multitasking, does it not?

I like having my services run in the background without being terminated or paused.

I think Project Butter solved a lot of these smoothness issues.

[TheEdensan]

To be honest even though Hardware Acceleration does help tremendously, the most important issue IMO with Android is that it does not prioritize user-interaction well enough over services that run in the background.

I have a Galaxy Nexus and have been an Android developer for more than 2 years now and I still don't understand why they're not considering the iOS approach where everything else is put on hold once the user starts interacting with the device to guarantee the best experience possible

[ChaosKratosV]

Romain Guy says that a canvas returned by SurfaceHolder.lockCanas() cannot be hardware accelerated.

[ChaosKratosV]

c.isHardwareAccelerated()retur­ns false for me

[ShadowriverUB]

Or else Android using render to texture, everything will be rerendered each frame in OpenGL in order to be showed.

[chrischoy9]

Galaxy S's web browser is hardware accelerated.