Hi, This is something we have investigated several times in the past. The biggest issue with hardware acceleration of the 2D drawing API is coverage. Many features offered by the existing 2D APIs are difficult or extremely expensive to implement using OpenGL. There are also issues with various OpenGL implementations. As game developers know very well, different GPUs and OpenGL drivers sometimes behave a little differently or suffer from different bugs. By using a software rendering API we can guarantee rendering fidelity across all devices. There is also the problem that mobile GPUs are not all well suited for the kind of operations required by a 2D drawing API as currently used by the Android UI toolkit (fill rate or shaders complexity can be a problem for instance.)
Hardware acceleration of the drawing APIs is something we would love to have but it is by no means a magic bullet that's going to solve all issues. For what it's worth, window composition is already hardware accelerated and has been so since Android 1.0. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 10:36 AM, markusn82 <markus...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've been developing Android application for quite awhile now. Please > correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know the UI toolkit and 2D > graphics API aren't hardware accelerated (the official documentation > states that Canvas is not accelerated). I've found that most non- > trivial animation or blending operations are painfully slow even on > mid-level devices like a Droid, even after taking much time to > optimize my code. > > I'd like to know what the rationale is for not providing hardware > support for these frameworks? Wouldn't it be possible to at least make > it optional for vendors to implement support? Does anyone have any > additional information about this issue? > > Thanks! > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en > -- Romain Guy Android framework engineer romain...@android.com Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
