The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

bonch writes "Charles Ying argues that Android's UX architecture has serious technical issues because, unlike the iPhone and Windows 7, Android composites the interface in software to retain compatibility with lower-class devices. Additionally, Android runs Java bytecode during animation, and garbage collection blocks the drawing system. Google engineers dismiss the desire for hardware-accelerated compositing and cite more powerful hardware and an avoidance of temporary objects as a solution to the collection pauses, but Ying argues that will just lead to [a lower] average battery life compared to devices like the iPhone."

Comments

Re:Doesn't Optimizing for GPU Exacerbate Fragmenti

[TheRaven64]

Add to that, you really don't need to optimise the code that you use for compositing on the GPU. A low-end mobile GPU can render something on the order of three million textured triangles per second. A typical mobile UI has a few dozen UI elements, with one texture and two triangles (one square) each. Even really crappy code is not going to come close to taxing the GPU. That's why we do compositing on the GPU - because it can run in its lowest-clocked mode and still provide fast performance, which lets you use the CPU for something else (or down-clock it too and save battery life).

Not about battery life

[SoftwareArtist]

There's a myth going around that battery life is strongly affected by how efficient your code is. On most phone, it's simply not true. By far the biggest power drains are the screen and the radios (cellular, wifi, bluetooth). On Android, there's even a handy battery monitor built in that you can use to confirm this (Settings->About phone->Battery use). I can spend half an hour playing a high end, graphics intensive game (Hero of Sparta) on my Nexus One, and when I then check the battery use, I find that even while I was playing the screen and the cellular radio standby were still the dominant uses of power.