Hey,
I just ordered my Nexus One and will be selling my HTC Magic for this. I have a GPS app (Papago X5 for HK- Android) which I bought for my Magic. The developer's website states that the screen resolution for which the app was designed is 320x480.
Does anyone know what happens to 'HVGA-only' applications on the Nexus/Droid? Does the app stretch to fit the screen making it pixelated, stay in a corner of the screen (not fullscreen) or does it simply not launch?
Thanks!
EDIT: I contacted the manufacturer and they said it works on the Motorola Milestone (WVGA, Android 2.0) but were unsure of whether it worked on Android 2.1. Is it possible that 2.1 breaks some applications?
It depends a bit on how the developer has set up the app. Depending on how it's been built, it may not show up as available in the Market for devices with higher res screens. Or, even if it's been designed to look its best under 320x480, the app can indicate support for higher res screens either explicitly or by allowing for default scaling and re-sizing. Letting Android take care of re-sizing may not make optimal use of the screen, but it should be usable. From what I've seen, default re-sizing ususally means screen elements get spread out over the larger screen, rather than preserving the original layout in a 320x480 section of the 480x8xx screen.
I have an app that I designed for my G1 and thus makes best use of a 320x480 screen, but I've provisioned it to scale up to larger screens and down to smaller screens in a fairly nice way--though it needs work to really use the extra space to best advantage. Google hasn't put out a 2.1 SDK yet, though I believe an app that works with 2.0.1 should work fine with 2.1 on the N1.
Thanks. The GPS program is sold at stores (DVD) and not on the Android Market so it showing up isn't a problem.
I also contacted the manufacturer and they said it works on the Motorola Milestone (WVGA, Android 2.0) but were unsure of whether it worked on Android 2.1. Is it possible that 2.1 breaks some applications?
Thanks.
Anyone?
(minimum length req)
I've had no problems with any apps on my nexus one. Usually if the app was designed for a smaller screen then it will either be pixelated a bit or only use up the part of the screen it needs. I've never heard of 2.1 breaking apps.
Saw this one on google+ and I think it's a nice read and very informative
How about some Android graphics true facts?
I get tired of seeing so much misinformation posted and repeated all over the place about how graphics rendering works on Android. Here is some truth:
• Android has always used some hardware accelerated drawing. Since before 1.0 all window compositing to the display has been done with hardware.
• This means that many of the animations you see have always been hardware accelerated: menus being shown, sliding the notification shade, transitions between activities, pop-ups and dialogs showing and hiding, etc.
• Android did historically use software to render the contents of each window. For example in a UI like http://www.simplemobilereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/2-home-menu.png there are four windows: the status bar, the wallpaper, the launcher on top of the wallpaper, and the menu. If one of the windows updates its contents, such as highlighting a menu item, then (prior to 3.0) software is used to draw the new contents of that window; however none of the other windows are redrawn at all, and the re-composition of the windows is done in hardware. Likewise, any movement of the windows such as the menu going up and down is all hardware rendering.
• Looking at drawing inside of a window, you don’t necessarily need to do this in hardware to achieve full 60fps rendering. This depends very much on the number of pixels in your display and the speed of your CPU. For example, Nexus S has no trouble doing 60fps rendering of all the normal stuff you see in the Android UI like scrolling lists on its 800x480 screen. The original Droid however struggled with a similar screen resolution.
• "Full" hardware accelerated drawing within a window was added in Android 3.0. The implementation in Android 4.0 is not any more full than in 3.0. Starting with 3.0, if you set the flag in your app saying that hardware accelerated drawing is allowed, then all drawing to the application’s windows will be done with the GPU. The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default rather than having to put android:handwareAccelerated="true" in their manifest. (And the reason this isn’t just turned on for all existing applications is that some types of drawing operations can’t be supported well in hardware and it also impacts the behavior when an application asks to have a part of its UI updated. Forcing hardware accelerated drawing upon existing apps will break a significant number of them, from subtly to significantly.)
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not all full of win. For example on the PVR drivers of devices like the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, simply starting to use OpenGL in a process eats about 8MB of RAM. Given that our process overhead is about 2MB, this is pretty huge. That RAM takes away from other things, such as the number of background processes that can be kept running, potentially slowing down things like app switching.
• Because of the overhead of OpenGL, one may very well not want to use it for drawing. For example some of the work we are doing to make Android 4.0 run well on the Nexus S has involved turning off hardware accelerated drawing in parts of the UI so we don’t lose 8MB of RAM in the system process, another 8MB in the phone process, another 8MB in the system UI process, etc. Trust me, you won’t notice -- there is just no benefit on that device in using OpenGL to draw something like the status bar, even with fancy animations going on in there.
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not a magical silver bullet to butter-smooth UI. There are many different efforts that have been going on towards this, such as improved scheduling of foreground vs. background threads in 1.6, rewriting the input system in 2.3, strict mode, concurrent garbage collection, loaders, etc. If you want to achieve 60fps, you have 20 milliseconds to handle each frame. This is not a lot of time. Just touching the flash storage system in the thread that is running the UI can in some cases introduce a delay that puts you out of that timing window, especially if you are writing to storage.
• A recent example of the kinds of interesting things that impact UI smoothness: we noticed that ICS on Nexus S was actually less smooth when scrolling through lists than it was on Gingerbread. It turned out that the reason for this was due to subtle changes in timing, so that sometimes in ICS as the app was retrieving touch events and drawing the screen, it would go to get the next event slightly before it was ready, causing it to visibly miss a frame while tracking the finger even though it was drawing the screen at a solid 60fps.
• When people have historically compared web browser scrolling between Android and iOS, most of the differences they are seeing are not due to hardware accelerated drawing. Originally Android went a different route for its web page rendering and made different compromises: the web page is turned in to a display list, which is continually rendered to the screen, instead of using tiles. This has the benefit that scrolling and zooming never have artifacts of tiles that haven’t yet been drawn. Its downside is that as the graphics on the web page get more complicated to draw the frame rate goes down. As of Android 3.0, the browser now uses tiles, so it can maintain a consistent frame rate as you scroll or zoom, with the negative of having artifacts when newly needed tiles can’t be rendered quickly enough. The tiles themselves are rendered in software, which I believe is the case for iOS as well. (And this tile-based approach could be used prior to 3.0 without hardware accelerated drawing; as mentioned previously, the Nexus S CPU can easily draw the tiles to the window at 60fps.)
• Hardware accleration does not magically make drawing performance problems disappear. There is still a limit to how much the GPU can do. A recent interesting example of this is tablets built with Tegra 2 -- that GPU can touch every pixel of a 1280x800 screen about 2.5 times at 60fps. Now consider the Android 3.0 tablet home screen where you are switching to the all apps list: you need to draw the background (1x all pixels), then the layer of shortcuts and widgets (let’s be nice and say this is .5x all pixels), then the black background of all apps (1x all pixels), and the icons and labels of all apps (.5x all pixels). We’ve already blown our per-pixel budget, and we haven’t even composited the separate windows to the final display yet. To get 60fps animation, Android 3.0 and later use a number of tricks. A big one is that it tries to put all windows into overlays instead of having to copy them to the framebuffer with the GPU. In the case here even with that we are still over-budget, but we have another trick: because the wallpaper on Android is in a separate window, we can make this window larger than the screen to hold the entire bitmap. Now, as you scroll, the movement of the background doesn’t require any drawing, just moving its window... and because this window is in an overlay, it doesn’t even need to be composited to the screen with the GPU.
• As device screen resolution goes up, achieving a 60fps UI is closely related to GPU speed and especially the GPU’s memory bus bandwidth. In fact, if you want to get an idea of the performance of a piece of hardware, always pay close attention to the memory bus bandwidth. There are plenty of times where the CPU (especially with those wonderful NEON instructions) can go a lot faster than the memory bus.
All credit goes to Dianne Hackborn. Thanks for sharing this!
HAHAHAHA good facts, and very interesting!
Great post
yup, Nice Post!
Interesting observation!
For those interested:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1399258
http://www.droidgamers.com/index.ph...ics-in-grand-theft-auto-iii-with-a-few-tweaks
http://www.androidnext.de/howto/gta-3-bessere-grafik-dank-fan-patch/
Among the listed improvements, I saw steam rise from the vents where your first safe house is located when this this was added (not sure it was there before though).
This will also affect the resolution which won't change much, just the button layout which you can also adjust in the option menu.
I've also encountered slowdowns during cutscenes and a bit of stutter but nothing major.
Also when I installed this, I had no original .set file located in the folder. So I just dragged it there anyway.
Lag Fix
A user gave me an advice on how to combat the lag when adding the file above or lagginess in general:
"When you have successfully installed the game. Plug your phone to the computer go in to the "audio" folder. Here you have to arange the files from biggest to smallest. Then delete all the files from "CHAT.nfx" down to "END.nfx". It's a totall of 11 files. What this does is that it delete all the radio channels but all the sound FX in the game will stay the same. I have tried it out and after I did it the game runs smoothly".
Car Mods
original article by XDA
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/gta-iii-android-mods-and-tutorials/
Enjoy! All credit goes to listed site and users!
erm tegra 2 users already get all those effects dont we ? I would much rather have a frame rate fix. I expected the game to atleast run at a constant 30fps on our hardware. I constantly notice the slowdowns... i guess maybe pc games have spoiled me but has anyone else been annoyed by it.
ps. i think first update in market renders this mod pointless
No we don't. Its still version 1.1. Try it first.!
Sent from my SGH-T959 using Tapatalk
looks like its working because I see lighting effects on cars and streetlights now. It doesn't look like the buildings have all the lighting effects as in the screenshot, but I have nothing to compare it to really. Thanks for the tip, very easy to do.
Only one problem though, when you're watching a cutscene or looking at the map the skip button is in the middle of the screen. No big deal though.
That's weird then, i definitely have all the effects pictured in the comparisons (flares from lights, rain, smoke etc.) I'm not sure what version you guys/i am using but i will post some pics tonight. Maybe this explains my poor 20-30fps performance.
I'm currently using the market version. Supposedly it's been ripped from the xpleria play.
maybe try go to options to restore controllers to default? iirc mine wasnt at the middle of the screen. I hope later there are some ways to improve the graphic texture, that would be nice
Looks better but new .set file messed up my on screen controls
midnightmach said:
Looks better but new .set file messed up my on screen controls
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can rearrange it on the controls settings.
I have GTA from the market and updated it yesterday - i tried this file, but did not notice any significant (I say it was the same) improvement over the standard .set file (only controls were messed up).
The game looks amazing with the file. Maybe you just didnt make note of what it looked like prior, cause mine looks way, way better.
Tried again - still nothing - and just in case I went through some comparison shots - rain effects, headlights and lightning effects were there for me even with the standard file... maybe I'm missing something.
Hey guys XDA added an article for those looking to add additional cars.
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/gta-iii-android-mods-and-tutorials/
Hey FYI, XDA member hacksteak25 made an app for changing the graphics settings in GTA III. It worked great on my TF.
You can grab it here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1417810
I got another one!
This RAM manager app makes GTA run like a dream, especially with all effects turned up:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1305060
GTA for Android sure is turning out to be something great. It has me thinking of all the possibilities for PC game ports. I know it's probably a pipe dream, but my mind keeps circling back to Half Life 2 .
Thanks Phil. Finely, modding a game to add content, not to cracking it to make it work. Hats off to Rockstar.
GTA Mobile Modding Site
Hey all, there is now an entire website dedicated to modding the mobile version of GTA.
http://gta3mobilemodding.de.vu/
It's pretty light on content as of now, but it just went up 2 days ago.
Enjoy .
Hello everybody, and before all, sory for my english
The main objetive of this thread is to provide a guide to increase performance on high density screen GPU bound devices, for example, the nexus 10.
The last year android devices start shiping with very high definition screens, but without the necesary GPU muscle to make them work good.
Since I was a PC gamer, I know the terrible impact of high definition on the gaming performance, and, on this screen size, this is a useless impact, since the extra resolution are practicaly unperceptible.
The past week I spend a lot of time trying to change my device's resolution (a nexus 7) and with kernel modding, it is posible, but don't are great since I only play 1/3 of the devices usage, and the 1280x800 resolution are great for chat, browsing (or posting on the forum ).
Finally I find a great program that allow me to temporary change the display resolution of my device, and with the free version I was allowed to change resolution to 720x450, and on gaming performance, that was a GREAT performance updrade, even, with the wuality sacrifice (and on a 7 inch display, this wasn't a great lose.
In order to do that, I need to disable soft keys, since they bug A LOT with the resolution change, and to use a custom launcher because the default launcher bug too (go launcher ex is my favourite and the only one I test).
So, I leave a guide on how to prepare your device to use this mod to increase gaming performance, and to provide help to everyone who want it.
First of all, you NEED to be rooted.
Now, start with the device preparing.
Wee need a soft keys replacement, I recomend this one, work great and are really simple to customize.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jun.ace.piecontrol
Now, you need to remove the soft keys in order to gain extra screen space and to protect yourself from potential bugs on the user interface.
To do that, you need to edit your build.prop with an editor or manually with a text editor and add this line.
qemu.hw.mainkeys=1
Now, on the next boot your device have the soft keys disabled.
To protect the status bar from being bugged, we need to change the lcd density of our display in order to allow a phone status bar (the phablet one bug on low resolution displays, and on tablets without sofkeys, we need a status bar.
To do that, we need to edit from the build.prop editor the "ro.sf.lcd_density" parameter and set it to something above 214 (nexus 7 have 213 and it enable the phablet interface, and on 214 it enable a full phone interface, but with small icons and more work space, you need to test and find the most usefull dpi for your device)
Now, we need to install the "magic app", and start testing resolutions and trying to find the most confortable for us, I have the paid version and use on the nexus 7 (16:10 or 8:5) 480x768 since it allow GREAT performance improvement and a good image quality for my screen size.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nomone.resolution_changer
One example of a game that work GREAT with this trick is N.O.V.A. 3, on the tegra 3 plataform it is almost inplayable, and with the trick, on my nexus 7, it looks like this.
So, start testing this, and post your results, configs and devices.
Help us resolving the screen resolution fragmentation on devices!
And mods, please, help the post with a good language correction XD
Edit: Changed the APK link, to a new one, the new app have onscreen buttons to fix the navbar problems, so, pie controls are no longer needed, I leave the link here onlfy for people to know another alternative, thx for NoMone Devs!
i am planning to buy a 7 or 8" android with high resolution and was a bit worried about gaming performance because of the high resolution.. can you post a video of the performance gain plz?
Whoa! I might give this a go when I get home. Good Job.
i am interested for feedbacks in other heavy games like modern combat 4
this!
what android device and other mobile devices lacks.
there's no setting to set the resolution!
people out there always suggest me to change the dpi, but hell no!
"dpi" is not physical resolution, it just changing icon and other ui element to small or big.
this terms confuse many people.
they think DPI is the screen resolution.
and.... i just cannot understand the hype,
many vendors put high res 1080p on 5" device?
what the heck!? is it necessary?
what's next? ultra 4K res on 4" screen?
come on.. it's unnecesary and waste of battery.
gpu works hard to get the job done in that resolution. especially gaming.
thank you for sharing this trick for us.
google should consider to put resolution changer on the next android.
and android vendor should realize put hi-res on small screen is just plain dumb.
-----
Sent from Android device
i will try this thank you. . .:good:
It's hard to take a video without a camera, but to give youman example, on 500x800 asphalt 7 give me 60fps on the shangai track, with my 800x1280 default resolution, I have 20fps aprox with a lot of fluctutations, it's a great app, and with GMD hide buttons, is almost perfect.
Antara33 said:
It's hard to take a video without a camera, but to give youman example, on 500x800 asphalt 7 give me 60fps on the shangai track, with my 800x1280 default resolution, I have 20fps aprox with a lot of fluctutations, it's a great app, and with GMD hide buttons, is almost perfect.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ah that indeed seems to be very nice! i have tried it on my htc desire not it does not work nothing changed
yeahman45 said:
ah that indeed seems to be very nice! i have tried it on my htc desire not it does not work nothing changed
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, on the HTC Desire 480x800 display, you need to set it to something lower that it, for example, 360x600, it increase the gaming performance, this trick work great on high res display like the nexus 7 or nexus 10 displays for example, try to reduce the resoution to something that retain the original aspect ratio and be lower that 480x800, 360x600 or 240x400 make a grat change, but im not sure about image quality on this device...
Antara33 said:
Yes, on the HTC Desire 480x800 display, you need to set it to something lower that it, for example, 360x600, it increase the gaming performance, this trick work great on high res display like the nexus 7 or nexus 10 displays for example, try to reduce the resoution to something that retain the original aspect ratio and be lower that 480x800, 360x600 or 240x400 make a grat change, but im not sure about image quality on this device...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ok thx i have tried to set it to 360x640 on the free version.. but nothing happens.. it just say "Display scaler free has been granted root superuser permissions" and nothing happens
Mh, maybe this is a device specific issue, have you posted a review or sended the autor an feedback email about it?
Antara33 said:
Hello everybody, and before all, sory for my english
The main objetive of this thread is to provide a guide to increase performance on high density screen GPU bound devices, for example, the nexus 10.
The last year android devices start shiping with very high definition screens, but without the necesary GPU muscle to make them work good.
Since I was a PC gamer, I know the terrible impact of high definition on the gaming performance, and, on this screen size, this is a useless impact, since the extra resolution are practicaly unperceptible.
The past week I spend a lot of time trying to change my device's resolution (a nexus 7) and with kernel modding, it is posible, but don't are great since I only play 1/3 of the devices usage, and the 1280x800 resolution are great for chat, browsing (or posting on the forum ).
Finally I find a great program that allow me to temporary change the display resolution of my device, and with the free version I was allowed to change resolution to 720x450, and on gaming performance, that was a GREAT performance updrade, even, with the wuality sacrifice (and on a 7 inch display, this wasn't a great lose.
In order to do that, I need to disable soft keys, since they bug A LOT with the resolution change, and to use a custom launcher because the default launcher bug too (go launcher ex is my favourite and the only one I test).
So, I leave a guide on how to prepare your device to use this mod to increase gaming performance, and to provide help to everyone who want it.
First of all, you NEED to be rooted.
Now, start with the device preparing.
Wee need a soft keys replacement, I recomend this one, work great and are really simple to customize.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jun.ace.piecontrol
Now, you need to remove the soft keys in order to gain extra screen space and to protect yourself from potential bugs on the user interface.
To do that, you need to edit your build.prop with an editor or manually with a text editor and add this line.
qemu.hw.mainkeys=1
Now, on the next boot your device have the soft keys disabled.
To protect the status bar from being bugged, we need to change the lcd density of our display in order to allow a phone status bar (the phablet one bug on low resolution displays, and on tablets without sofkeys, we need a status bar.
To do that, we need to edit from the build.prop editor the "ro.sf.lcd_density" parameter and set it to something above 214 (nexus 7 have 213 and it enable the phablet interface, and on 214 it enable a full phone interface, but with small icons and more work space, you need to test and find the most usefull dpi for your device)
Now, we need to install the "magic app", and start testing resolutions and trying to find the most confortable for us, I have the paid version and use on the nexus 7 (16:10 or 8:5) 480x768 since it allow GREAT performance improvement and a good image quality for my screen size.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nexter.miniscalerfree
One example of a game that work GREAT with this trick is N.O.V.A. 3, on the tegra 3 plataform it is almost inplayable, and with the trick, on my nexus 7, it looks like this.
So, start testing this, and post your results, configs and devices.
Help us resolving the screen resolution fragmentation on devices!
And mods, please, help the post with a good language correction XD
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey I bought the app and it works fine i tried most of the resolutions and even a custom one but it seems that no resolution lower than my physical one will go full screen i always get black borders do you get this too?
thanks a8 soc
I tried tweaking my resolution to a higher one yet nothing happens on my Alcatel OneTouch T10. Any fix on this?
Sory for the lazy responce, I have so much time working and other personal things I read on the store that the apk only make the new resolution use the full screen on 4.2+ so if you are on 4.1-, you have it with black borders, sory, but I cant do anything for this :/
is there any way after change resolution for fix buttom touch key(it doesnt work physical touch key)? or any idea where is touch key config file or something like that related in root?
THUNDERASS said:
is there any way after change resolution for fix buttom touch key(it doesnt work physical touch key)? or any idea where is touch key config file or something like that related in root?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know, I suppose, android mao this keys as a touchscreen surface or something like that, the most easybway is using gmd hide softkeys and with it, trigger a softkeys quick navbar and play with this, I am using Paranoidandroid right now and with the pie controls I fix all my problems, and on smanager I created 2 scripts to execute the commands to change resolution, one for the 500x800 for gaming and the other to 1280x800, the default resolution of the nexus 7.
Try it and leave me a comment with your experience.
Antara33 said:
I don't know, I suppose, android mao this keys as a touchscreen surface or something like that, the most easybway is using gmd hide softkeys and with it, trigger a softkeys quick navbar and play with this, I am using Paranoidandroid right now and with the pie controls I fix all my problems, and on smanager I created 2 scripts to execute the commands to change resolution, one for the 500x800 for gaming and the other to 1280x800, the default resolution of the nexus 7.
Try it and leave me a comment with your experience.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanls for your reply.i have mtk quad core 6589T 1.5 ghz device with powervr 544MP1 and 1 gb ram . My screen is 1080p. i think gpu cant handle this resolution sometimes occur wierd lag and some highend games cant playable.After change resolution to 720p and 320 dpi everything perfect games performance increase %80-100 even memory consumption decreasing.(100mb).i am using with pie control but i want to using continiusly 720p i think after change resulotion touch key coordinates change over screen size.if i found that responsible cfg file or something maybe i can handle this.i am still searching..
THUNDERASS said:
Thanls for your reply.i have mtk quad core 6589T 1.5 ghz device with powervr 544MP1 and 1 gb ram . My screen is 1080p. i think gpu cant handle this resolution sometimes occur wierd lag and some highend games cant playable.After change resolution to 720p and 320 dpi everything perfect games performance increase %80-100 even memory consumption decreasing.(100mb).i am using with pie control but i want to using continiusly 720p i think after change resulotion touch key coordinates change over screen size.if i found that responsible cfg file or something maybe i can handle this.i am still searching..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For me, the way to go is sticking with default res for everything except gaming, as I say, I have two scripts on 2 widgets on my main screen, one with the commands
su
wm size 500x800
And the other with the commands
su
wm size reset
on jely bean 4.3 this commands set the override resolution of the screen.
on android 4.2.x the wm have to be replaced with am.
The app launch this terminal commands and override our resolution, but since I cant buy the app because of credit card and legal issues on argentina, I made my own scripts with smanager and swidgets . Quick on the fly change, and "letz rack!"
i am using this fantastic program on my thl w8s to scale resolution from 1080p to 720p during games and the speedup is fantastic...i set tasker to autolaunch the app when i click on the game icon, and once finished the game just click on fixes/reset resolution to bring everything back to 1080p . this program is great and the only one i have found...let's hope the developer doesn't abandon it and keeps making it better....and with a better integration in tasker maybe