Database Info

Hardware acceleration at Launchers

Guys, I know NOTHING about any kind of programing, development or Android.
I am experiencing it for less than a month! (And I loved it)
The only downside from ipad2 (Yeah.. I said it) is feel of GUI.
I read a lot of xda and rooted my device, loaded clockwork, installed tiamat 1.4.4 and clocked it to 1.6 (interactive), and loaded Launcher pro.
So I think it is as far as I can get close to THAT feeling of smoothness.
In my last week of massive Googling I found out that at Android 3.x,
there is 2d hardware acceleration for apps that have the proper code. And GUI is not using it currently.
Is it possible to write down a Launcher app that have actual 2D Hardware Acceleration at GUI?
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

Turkawa said:
Guys, I know NOTHING about any kind of programing, development or Android.
I am experiencing it for less than a month! (And I loved it)
The only downside from ipad2 (Yeah.. I said it) is feel of GUI.
I read a lot of xda and rooted my device, loaded clockwork, installed tiamat 1.4.4 and clocked it to 1.6 (interactive), and loaded Launcher pro.
So I think it is as far as I can get close to THAT feeling of smoothness.
In my last week of massive Googling I found out that at Android 3.x,
there is 2d hardware acceleration for apps that have the proper code. And GUI is not using it currently.
Is it possible to write down a Launcher app that have actual 2D Hardware Acceleration at GUI?
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Who says the stock launcher has hardware acceleration off? Have you checked the AndroidManifest XML to verify?

ydaraishy said:
Who says the stock launcher has hardware acceleration off? Have you checked the AndroidManifest XML to verify?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What is that?
I only tell you what I remember from heaps of reading I did..lots of them junk probably..
But it makes sense.
I can play a 3d game flawlessly and my icon jitter and stutter when I scroll from A screen to B screen?
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

Here it is..
Romain Guy wrote
" It is not turned on by default for compatibility reasons. Not 100% of the Canvas API is supported when turned on (although the missing parts are very few and rarely used) and there might be bugs in the new implementation. There are also new constraints (for instance if you try to draw a bitmap larger than the maximum OpenGL texture size, it will fail.)
The new rendering pipeline also uses native display lists for each View, which triggers bugs in some apps. For instance, if a View relies on its parent to invalidate() to redraw itself, it's a bug in the app, but it "works" without hardware acceleration. It will however not work with hardware acceleration on.
Our goal is to make hardware acceleration on by default as soon as possible but we do not want to break apps. That said, apps using standard views and APIs should work just fine."
Much more detailed at
hxxp://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/android-30-hardware-acceleration.html (cant post links yet)
I dont know If ADW ex or Pro launcher uses 2D_HWA.
But as far as i know both these apps are not optimized for honeycomb yet.
And i hope thats true. Couse if they are, that means thats all we can get from xoom on "Sliding icons" department.

Turkawa said:
Guys, I know NOTHING about any kind of programing, development or Android.
I am experiencing it for less than a month! (And I loved it)
The only downside from ipad2 (Yeah.. I said it) is feel of GUI.
I read a lot of xda and rooted my device, loaded clockwork, installed tiamat 1.4.4 and clocked it to 1.6 (interactive), and loaded Launcher pro.
So I think it is as far as I can get close to THAT feeling of smoothness.
In my last week of massive Googling I found out that at Android 3.x,
there is 2d hardware acceleration for apps that have the proper code. And GUI is not using it currently.
Is it possible to write down a Launcher app that have actual 2D Hardware Acceleration at GUI?
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree.....UI seems very laggy to me compared to my iPad 1....its not even close to being on the same level of the iPad 2.

hw acceleration

As you know our android devices did not use that from the beginning to the ics. Our devices was not smooth as iPhone coz it didnt use gpu instead of cpu in transitions as i hear. But ics uses hw acceleration and it is smooth on even i9000. Now i ask you, is it possible to port hw accelaleration to our gingerbread devices as a mod or tweak?
Ps: i am a noob about these things for now sorry if i am wrong but i said these as i understood

dorukc said:
As you know our android devices did not use that from the beginning to the ics. Our devices was not smooth as iPhone coz it didnt use gpu instead of cpu in transitions as i hear.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's not true.
1. We have acceleration. But this is not requirement. IE developers can use hw acceleration and can not use it. For iPhone they should use only accelerated API.
2. In iPhone the user interface process has realtime priority. When user made some action, all background processes stopped and only process processed user action will work: try open some page in browser and while it is loading try to move the screen. The loading will stopped. In Android UI process is usual process. When you will move the page in browser it will continue loading the page. But because not all CPU used for work with UI process it can be lesser smooth than iPhone one
It's just different logic of UI. That's all.
Sent from my GT-I9003

Ya but I have used iphone 4. And believe me guys our phone looks really a piece of crap infront of iphone. Its really smooth like silk. Our phone lag like hell when we want to do some heavy multi tasking (only 3-4 apps). But with nearly 11 open apps still iphone run so much smooth. I accept that its not open source bla bla bla...but remember guys still android has to learn a lot to reach level of smoothness of iphone.

The advantages of Android will be on multicore CPUs. This is because of logic. While one core will be executing UI process, others will execute other processes. On IOS all other processes will be frozen
Sent from my GT-I9003

vishal24387 said:
Our phone lag like hell when we want to do some heavy multi tasking (only 3-4 apps). But with nearly 11 open apps still iphone run so much smooth.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That tends to happen when you have 3-4 processing apps and compare it to 11 frozen apps. Try having a few apps idle in the background on the i9003 and it's smooth as silk too.

Are you sure about GPU ? I don't think our i9003 use that.
A made a test : Opera mobile is the best browser ever because of he uses GPU acceleration. And the GPU acceleration is so awesome wich some big websites are more smooth in i9003 than iphone 4. If all the UI use the GPU, I don't think the phone laggy.

Ryryoku said:
Are you sure about GPU ? I don't think our i9003 use that.
A made a test : Opera mobile is the best browser ever because of he uses GPU acceleration. And the GPU acceleration is so awesome wich some big websites are more smooth in i9003 than iphone 4. If all the UI use the GPU, I don't think the phone laggy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am agree with Ryryoku, the smoothness of opera mini/mobile gives as same experience as we get in iPhone , so i think his point is valid, this is the reason why Opera is smoother than any other browser of android...

Question regarding Gpu rendering ui

I've been breaking my head over here testing and flashing and editing ect to see what is the best balance for performance. There is something I have come across. Its the pulldown notification bar behavior in touchwiz (only touchwiz for some reason when using LP or Go they are not affected). Using stock kernel I have noticed when forcing gpu ui rendering "debug.sf.hw=1" it performs better and there is no lag in the pulldown. Flash the faux kernel and your swiping performance seems even better (prob due to OC) but the pulldown becomes laggy. It stutters. Always. Every rom every time. (Some are a little better but compare it to another and its very noticeable). This is only affected with touchwiz and only on the home screens. Open an app and pulldown behaves normal again. Then on some other roms using a stock kernel the gpu forced has the same behavior. Lag. Only there. Only touchwiz. Remove it from the build prop and voila smooth pulldown again. I know I could use another launcher but I like touchwiz compared to other launchers (its the smoothest but lacks features I know). Same result with the modded 4.5 Tw as well. Then there are other roms that perform amazing without gpu ui rendering like TPC. Its disabled in the build prop. So basically I need someone smarter than me to shed some light as to what this may be. Do we need to render the ui in gpu? Is it better? Why is only touchwiz affected? Does it use some sort of rendering that conflicts in certain cases? Is there something completely different causing this? Thanks a bunch and hope to hear what you all have to say

[Q] Hardware acceleration @ home screen?

Currently I am using the Weapon G2x 3.0_R1, with the latest GO Launcher. Ive realized that even at 1.4GHz (for testing purpose only, i normally run @ 1.1 or 1.2 max), I still lag with that "sphere" animation on homescreen, however in app drawer it is extremely smooth no matter what. The lag is especially worse with live wallpaper (even with other 2d animation it gets choppy)
Maybe its all the widgets I am running I dont know, but Ive seen the GPU power on this phone when I run GTA3 and all the other 3d games etc, it should be able to handle these simple 3d rendering from home screen scrolling......
So I am guessing the hardware acceleration isnt enabled by default....
Does anyone know how to enable it? I've only found the build.prop tweak on SGS2 forum which didnt help (tested, same choppy animation). Any veteran user can teach me how to tweak g2x so go launcher/weapong2x will optimize the rendering?
Thanks in advance.

hhwong said:
Currently I am using the Weapon G2x 3.0_R1, with the latest GO Launcher. Ive realized that even at 1.4GHz (for testing purpose only, i normally run @ 1.1 or 1.2 max), I still lag with that "sphere" animation on homescreen, however in app drawer it is extremely smooth no matter what. The lag is especially worse with live wallpaper (even with other 2d animation it gets choppy)
Maybe its all the widgets I am running I dont know, but Ive seen the GPU power on this phone when I run GTA3 and all the other 3d games etc, it should be able to handle these simple 3d rendering from home screen scrolling......
So I am guessing the hardware acceleration isnt enabled by default....
Does anyone know how to enable it? I've only found the build.prop tweak on SGS2 forum which didnt help (tested, same choppy animation). Any veteran user can teach me how to tweak g2x so go launcher/weapong2x will optimize the rendering?
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well first there's no full hardware acceleration on Weapon as that's just a GB ROM and not an ICS ROM. The lag you're experiencing is probably just due to Go Launchers coding. I don't think it was meant to be smooth with all those widgets plus a live wallpaper running. I use GO Launcher as well and love it, but I use the standard animations rather than the spherical ones.
Also, that build.prop tweak in the SSG2 forum was there because the GB SGS2 ROM actually has hardware acceleration. But that's only for that phone, that's why it didn't work for you.

mackster248 said:
Well first there's no full hardware acceleration on Weapon as that's just a GB ROM and not an ICS ROM. The lag you're experiencing is probably just due to Go Launchers coding. I don't think it was meant to be smooth with all those widgets plus a live wallpaper running. I use GO Launcher as well and love it, but I use the standard animations rather than the spherical ones.
Also, that build.prop tweak in the SSG2 forum was there because the GB SGS2 ROM actually has hardware acceleration. But that's only for that phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ahh....well do you happen to know any launcher with that sphere animation? That is basically the only thing I like about GO Launcher lol. I just want a launcher with that animation running at at least 50+ fps. I heard awd EX is very good though, any experience with that?

Benefits/disadvantages to developer GPU options?

What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of enabling "force GPU rendering" and "disable HW overlays"?
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app

Hi,
You can test easily by yourself and see if you see any advantages and/or disadvantages, right? Just tick/untick and even no need for a reboot... It tends to make some old apps smoother.
If it helps you, here are two quotes that summarize well.
About "force GPU rendering":
Enabling this preference in developer options offloads task of rendering window components like buttons, text and complex 2d graphics calculations to GPU. This often results in much faster UI rendering including animations.
On one side you will definitely achieve better frame rate (and hence smooth experience) throughout system, but you may end up using more battery. On certain devices, GPU consumes more power the CPU, hence you may observe 5-15% lower battery life with option enabled.
I would recommend having this option enabled on devices with weaker CPUs e.g. You should seldom need to enable this on dual-core 1.4ghz ARM CPU.
offloading UI rendering to GPU has obvious benefits so that CPU can work on other important tasks like database IO, data manipulation, layout calculations and responding to other user inputs.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
About "HW overlays":
molesarecoming said:
... hardware overlay allows the renderer to take a couple of regions aside and treat them optimized. then theres the cpu and gpu. usually android decides which abstraction is best for each view, taking things like transparency into account and what not. you switch hw overlays off, project butter goes out of the window but cpu and gpu still do the job. you force gpu, the composition will be done by your gfx chip. just don't touch it - its meant for developers picking up debugging output.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have force GPU rendering enabled since years, it helps about smoothness in XDA app for example, on my side never encountered any side effects, at least for me.

Thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for. I usually keep force GPU rendering on as well but always had mixed results with disable HW overlays. The definitions helped make sense of that.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app

Hi. I'm rooted with xposed- stock os. I know that I can no longer enable art so i am wondering if this is the same.... Can I enable the GPU HW and rendering without a brick or bootloop
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

dec1153 said:
Hi. I'm rooted with xposed- stock os. I know that I can no longer enable art so i am wondering if this is the same.... Can I enable the GPU HW and rendering without a brick or bootloop
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi,
No, it's not the same thing, about ART: http://forum.xda-developers.com/goo...dicated-runtime-thread-art-vs-dalvik-t2516646.
And yes you can enable them without any issue, nothing related to Xposed (unless an Xposed module breaks something related to those options but I highly doubt). If you want to be sure then make a Nandoid backup before (in any case the "Disable HW overlays" doesn't persist at boot).