# Disable Hardware Overlays?



## Kancerstick

Was curious if anyone know what this does? And if there is any benefit to having it enabled or disabled?


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## Smcdo123

Same here

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## svdv1351

Kancerstick said:


> Was curious if anyone know what this does? And if there is any benefit to having it enabled or disabled?


Without a hardware overlay every application that is displaying things on the screen will share video memory and will have to constantly check for collision and clipping to render a proper image, this can cost a lot of processing power. With a hardware overlay each application gets its own portion of video memory, getting rid of the need to check for collision and clipping.

Basically, using hardware overlays can reduce CPU usage by quite a bit, so I would leave it enabled.


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## yarly

What he said ↑

Disable it and the latency period for applications and the OS (any OS, not just Android) itself to render things will go way way up because it has to check to make sure it's not screwing with memory that is supposed to be dedicated to another task than its own. Hardware overlay ensures everyone has their own partition of memory so they don't have to do those checks and so latency to render things on the screen decreases dramatically.

If you're a windows user, it's typically done through using Directx. Linux desktops do it through the X Window System + OpenGL.


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## winner00

So in plain terms if you check it stuff will lag.


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## Smcdo123

yarly said:


> What he said ↑
> 
> Disable it and the latency period for applications and the OS (any OS, not just Android) itself to render things will go way way up because it has to check to make sure it's not screwing with memory that is supposed to be dedicated to another task than its own. Hardware overlay ensures everyone has their own partition of memory so they don't have to do those checks and so latency to render things on the screen decreases dramatically.
> 
> If you're a windows user, it's typically done through using Directx. Linux desktops do it through the X Window System + OpenGL.


I love your responses. They are so informative and lengthy. I learn so much from them. How about using GPU does that help? I know it uses more memory but on ICS it def helped. JB not sure if its needed. Can you give me some details on that please? Thanks in advance.

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## yarly

Smcdo123 said:


> I love your responses. They are so informative and lengthy. I learn so much from them. How about using GPU does that help? I know it uses more memory but on ICS it def helped. JB not sure if its needed. Can you give me some details on that please? Thanks in advance.
> 
> Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using RootzWiki


What do you mean by using the GPU? Android 4.0 uses the GPU to render nearly everything, except maybe certain things in the browser.


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## Smcdo123

Developer options has an option for force gpu rendering.

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## yarly

Smcdo123 said:


> Developer options has an option for force gpu rendering.
> 
> Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using RootzWiki


Only some legacy apps and parts of the browser do not use gpu rendering by default. However, it should not cause any issues if you enable it.


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## Smcdo123

yarly said:


> Only some legacy apps and parts of the browser do not use gpu rendering by default. However, it should not cause any issues if you enable it.


thanks appreciate it!


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## haXBOXpro

Hi just reading through this thread helps me understand a lot about the functionality of HW overly.
One question though,I've been having issues with YouTube displaying videos! If I leave this option enabled then I only get sound on YouTube and a black screen but when I disable HW overlay everything seems fine!
Any suggestion s why this is or if anyone else has experienced similar ?!


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