# Android hardware acceleration



## jeffykins (Jul 26, 2011)

I have been looking into hardware acceleration on my sgs2. It is a higher end android phone and does have a gpu from what i can glean. This is what i have learned.

1. Android is capable of hardware acceleration but as of giingerbread it is not automatic. This means by default it is not used but apps such as opera have access to it i guess.

2. Hardware acceleration should both allow smoother opperation of the interface..ie eliminate lag etc. And it should allow be easier on the battery as it frees up the cpu by not using software to render video or images.

3. There are apps such as dice player that use hardware acceleration explicitly to increase performance of video playback etc.

Given these i did an experiment running many many episodes of battlestar galactica ( i know poor me ). I would check each time after a 43 min episode to see the drain. Thing is...using dice and the stock player i got the same results. Does this mean that tje battery savings of HA is excagerated (i know thats wrong) or am i not understanding something correctly? I am curious what any of you guys are experiencing or know. Thanks in advance.


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## TRE_588 (Jun 6, 2011)

Hardware acceleration isn't in gingerbread, its in honey comb and coming with ics


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## poontab (Jun 7, 2011)

jeffykins said:


> Does this mean that tje battery savings of HA is excagerated...


Pretty much.

A lot of people want it but it's not as glorious as it might sound.

The 8th response in this post is a good explanation.

Also the drivers for the different HW can be considered proprietary & the only thing truly open about Android is the Linux kernel. So lets say the new Nexus has full HW acceleration on everything. It really wouldn't help anyone with a different CPU/GPU combo as no one is going to write for them. Like Sense UI has HW acceleration in some aspects but that won't help out anyone not running Sense.



Agt Studly said:


> Hardware acceleration isn't in gingerbread, its in honey comb and coming with ics


Yes it's there if an app is built to use it.


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## JBirdVegas (Jun 11, 2011)

Odd my research into Android GPU has HW acceleration support going back to eclair

It used to be a popullar hack, from what I've read.

That is why I included adding the flag for GPU in my app PropModder

...if you can find docs saying GPU isn't supported I would be very interested in the links


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## jeffykins (Jul 26, 2011)

Hmm thats disapointing. I was looking forward to leaps and bounds improvements just by enabling HWA. 

I have notices differences between for example browser which isnt HWA and opera which is. Opera is much smoother and i was led to believe it was for this reason. I alsi have an htc thunderbold which has pretty descent specs..running cm7 (no bloatware) i still grt lag on things like the app drawer. I think from what i have seen iphone suffers from this to a lesser degree. Why is this when on average the specs for an iphone are less than a high end android phone.

Thanks again for the answers everyone.


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