will android ever have a gpu accelerated UI?

[Raghu]

Not just speed - battery life suffers too. GPU is extremely efficient at rendering and saves tons of battery compared to software rendering on CPU.

Honeycomb is expected to be the earliest version with complete GPU rendering.

One more thing to consider would be the screen resolution. At smartphone resolutions the CPU might be able to keep up, but as resolutions increase, esp for tablets - GPU acceleration becomes a necessity.

 

[Eug]

While these phones are computers, people DO NOT view them as pocket computers.

I view my iPhone 4 as a pocket computer.

The main usage of my iPhone 4 is to check email and surf the net, as well as organize my calendar and keep track of my contacts. I run some utilities on it too. Oh and I make phone calls on it from time to time too.

 

[MJinZ]

seriously. GPU acceleration worked fine when we had ATI cards, NVidia cards and 3dfx cards. Sure some games ran better on Glide or whatever, but we had some form of acceleration.

This is just completely pissing me off because there is no smooth Android UI yet. Either go with no widgets or whatever... Bleh.

lol well Android sucks at this point what can you do.

I'm going to Windows Phone asap.

 

[amdhunter]

i havent heard anything about gingerbread or honeycomb having this (IMO) 'must have' feature. no matter which rom i try there's always an element of lag when moving between screens, scrolling through apps etc. some less than others of course.

the phones in the last year have gpus powerful enough to do this, so why not?

And you've found the main reason I don't want an Android phone. Even the smoothest UI I've seen (on an Epic 4G) looked horrible.

iPhone has a smooth UI, and Windows Phone has been described as "embarrasingly smooth."

I just wish Sprint would announce a WP7 phone already so I can buy it.

 

[snikt]

Not it hasn't.

While these phones are computers, people DO NOT view them as pocket computers.

Keep telling yourself that.

 

[finbarqs]

And you've found the main reason I don't want an Android phone. Even the smoothest UI I've seen (on an Epic 4G) looked horrible.

iPhone has a smooth UI, and Windows Phone has been described as "embarrasingly smooth."

I just wish Sprint would announce a WP7 phone already so I can buy it.

you and me brother

I'm rockin' a slow-ass EVO 4G.

 

[MrX8503]

you and me brother

I'm rockin' a slow-ass EVO 4G.

lol

I wouldn't call the EVO "slow-ass". I did own an EVO on launch and I knew that Android had some lag issues that I was willing to live with, but HTC effed up with the 30fps cap. When I realized that HTC crippled their phone on an already laggy Android OS, I pitched the thing and got an iPhone instead.

Luckily HTC did fix the problem, but not soon enough for me to trade it in for something else.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

lol well Android sucks at this point what can you do.

I'm going to Windows Phone asap.

The thing is it SHOULDN'T suck. If Apple could do it with ARM11 processors, and other OSes could, why does it take 1ghz and even with all the tweaking people do, the launcher isn't as buttery smooth as a slower iPhone 4 (and iP4 has a higher res)? I don't know.... People used to use the excuse about the 3GS' crappy resolution, but what now?

I remember when the DROID came out and I bashed it for being slow and shitty. People flamed me for that. Well, who the hell here would run at 550mhz stock launcher now? And if people complain that an overclocked Droid with Launcher Pro still can't catch up with an iPhone, then what the hell was 550mhz on Moto's stock launcher? A fucking slideshow?

This whole smooth UI crap is annoying. I'd like to put it aside and I did many times. I tried to tell myself this is good enough, but everytime I have a gathering with my iPhone fanboy friends and we want to do something on our smartphones, it's embarassing. Forcecloses, Launcher Pro redraws, etc etc.... you could blame me for having a slower DROID, but I'd be willing to bet I can get just as much done on my tethered iPod Touch 1G.

And here I am wanting to upgrade, but there's nothing to upgrade to. It's like there are no faster devices really... I really am just missing out on the 512mb RAM option, but other than that my 1.1ghz overclock should keep me neck and neck in terms of UI smoothness at least. But more importantly, we need Google to update their code and to possibly allow GPU acceleration.

 

[zoiks]

Not sure what some of you are bitching about. I have a Nexus one with the MIUI rom and it frigging rocks. By comparision to new phones, it is an oldie but I hardly experience any lag when I use it which is pretty much all the time. And I have oodles of apps on it too.

Some of you get too much caught up by buzzwords and what yahoo novices complain about which are issues but aren't as big as they make it out to be.

 

[tommo123]

T
And here I am wanting to upgrade, but there's nothing to upgrade to. It's like there are no faster devices really... I really am just missing out on the 512mb RAM option, but other than that my 1.1ghz overclock should keep me neck and neck in terms of UI smoothness at least. But more importantly, we need Google to update their code and to possibly allow GPU acceleration.

to be honest, i actually thought that maybe htc would have bene able to do this themselves. i mean, anrdoid is open source right? if they did do this, it would be one hell of a selling point to the android masses over the competition

as i said before, i cant upgrade till a year from now so hopefully it'll be done by then, *or*, some talented dev on xda figures out how to do it (i can dream).

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

to be honest, i actually thought that maybe htc would have bene able to do this themselves. i mean, anrdoid is open source right? if they did do this, it would be one hell of a selling point to the android masses over the competition

as i said before, i cant upgrade till a year from now so hopefully it'll be done by then, *or*, some talented dev on xda figures out how to do it (i can dream).

Well HTC didn't add GPu acceleration, but they sure did optimize their phones. You could call Sense bloatware, but it adds features. At the same time, HTC has managed to make it damn smooth. Imagine the stock Droid launcher with Sense widgets. You'd be going 1fps tops. Obviously HTC did something with the Eris to make it damn smooth and smother than a stock Droid. Makes you wonder.

Of course when you add Sense, you also trade off performance.... what do you expect? I'm glad HTC upgraded Android in the sense that it brought features that were badly needed like a good copy and paste system. I mean everyone made fun of the iPhone for it's nonexistent copy and paste system, but when I'm struggling to land my cursor on the right letter in a word on Android, what good is copy and paste? Thank goodness Sense brought in a good improvement.

Right now I see Android as just the anti iPhone, especially in the US. People here hate the iPhone because it is the iPhone and because it is locked to AT&T and only GSM capable. You really have no other options out there if you want a smartphone with a decent touchscreen experience. Thus everyone flocks to Android. People will turn a blind eye to the fact that the apps suck more than the iOS 2.0 apps, the fact that the UI is still terribly choppy, worse than an iPhone 2G at times, etc etc. The fact is since not everyone can get the iPhone, Android is the solution. It enables people who had no touchscreen phone (pre WP7 of course) to now get a phone (the people who wanted to stick to VZW, Sprint, T-Mo). So forget how good or competitive it is to the iPhone. Forget how much it lacks here and there. The fact that there is competition is enough for Phandroids to go "ZOMG u failz Apple"

With that said I do appreciate all the advanced customizations that Android provides. I obviously wouldn't be flashing ROMs left and right with an iPhone had I kept mine. But at the same time, I wouldn't be flashing ROMs left and right on an iPhone just to pray that my UI experience will be 1% smoother because every 1% counts when you're on Android.

 

[Bateluer]

DLeRium, your rants are way over blown.

 

[murphy55d]

My wife had an iPhone 3GS for awhile as well as an iPod Touch, and I honestly do not think my DroidX is any less "smooth". I just upgraded from a D1 (which was overclocked) and I never felt it to be laggy. I rooted my DX and stripped out all the Blur crap and to me it performs as I expected it to.

I don't think all the UI overlays/launchers like TouchWiz and Blur help matters at all. Vanilla android runs pretty well to me. Sense is not bad, either.

 

[MrX8503]

DLeRium, your rants are way over blown.

Lol they are, but I appreciate his enthusiasm, lol.

 

[Yuriman]

Android is a high-maintenance OS, perhaps unnecessarily so. There is no QC on the market, leaving you to sift through hundreds of crap apps which can ruin your phone's performance and drain battery. The stock launcher is almost pathetic, and the average user doesn't have the know-how to keep the OS clean. I guess it's the price we pay for a truly open OS. There is no good reason for android to be lacking gpu acceleration at this point; I could forgive its other faults if it did.

@the Droid1 specifically: Even overclocked to 1ghz+, it will not perform similarly to modern phones. The Snapdragons and Hummingbirds are simply much faster, clock for clock, in some cases. That said, I'm quite pleased with my D1. With tweaking, it feels nearly as fast as an i4.

I know how to get a good experience from Android, but it's silly to expect everyone to.

 

[Bateluer]

Android is a high-maintenance OS, perhaps unnecessarily so. There is no QC on the market, leaving you to sift through hundreds of crap apps which can ruin your phone's performance and drain battery.

This is something Google needs to address. While they shouldn't be filtering or expelling apps, aside from legal reasons, they do need to add some better filtering and sorting options to the Android Market. I get a lot of my apps from hits on XDA and round ups their and at similar sites, Top Ten Lists, etc. But rarely am I wading through page after page after page of applications on my phone looking for apps to install.

Course, my D1 also has someone limited storage space for apps.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Android is a high-maintenance OS, perhaps unnecessarily so. There is no QC on the market, leaving you to sift through hundreds of crap apps which can ruin your phone's performance and drain battery. The stock launcher is almost pathetic, and the average user doesn't have the know-how to keep the OS clean. I guess it's the price we pay for a truly open OS. There is no good reason for android to be lacking gpu acceleration at this point; I could forgive its other faults if it did.

@the Droid1 specifically: Even overclocked to 1ghz+, it will not perform similarly to modern phones. The Snapdragons and Hummingbirds are simply much faster, clock for clock, in some cases. That said, I'm quite pleased with my D1. With tweaking, it feels nearly as fast as an i4.

I know how to get a good experience from Android, but it's silly to expect everyone to.

Actually clock for clock the TI Omap will outdo the Snapdragon. The PowerSGX 530 that the Droid 1 has is quite comparable to the Adreno 205 GPU. Even the Nexus One is only on the Adreno 200.

It's the same architecture Cortex A8 equivalent. There's no reason a Droid 1 will be outdone so easily. The only difference with the newer 3600 CPU is that the GPU is clocked at double the rate. That's how the Droid2/X remain competitive. The main suffering point of the D1 is really the lack of memory. 256mb is just not enough. In order to keep the 50mb free you need for a relatively smooth UI, you will end up not allowing many apps to stay open. 512mb seems barely enough.

 

[zerocool84]

It's not that hard to figure out how certain companies can make a smooth UI with low end hardware, it's called controlling every aspect of the phone. Apple controls every part of their phones which makes it easy to optimize for. Plus it's not like their phones could do many things at once until recently when they got much powerful. Just like Windows Phone 7, they lock down what hardware can be on the phone and can optimize for it better. Plus that doesn't have multi-tasking either. If any of those OS's became open like Android, they'd have the same and even worse problems than Android ever has. It's the nature of having an OS that's not locked down. There are pluses and minuses to all phone OS's. Android lacks stuff, Apple lacks stuff, WP7 lacks stuff. There still is no #1 phone OS out there. Every single one has too many trade-offs to be called the hands down best.

 

[YoungGun21]

There was speculation that 2.3 might bring this feature to the table.

 

[Patranus]

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[Yuriman]

Actually clock for clock the TI Omap will outdo the Snapdragon. The PowerSGX 530 that the Droid 1 has is quite comparable to the Adreno 205 GPU. Even the Nexus One is only on the Adreno 200.

I was basing this off of benches I've run, but I don't have a lot of hardware to compare. It seems my droid at 1.0 is faster in quadrant, for example, but gets whipped in linpack (snapdragon almost doubles it). Compared with an HD2, with similar processor clocks, the HTC phone seems to score about 25% higher in graphical benches.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I was basing this off of benches I've run, but I don't have a lot of hardware to compare. It seems my droid at 1.0 is faster in quadrant, for example, but gets whipped in linpack (snapdragon almost doubles it). Compared with an HD2, with similar processor clocks, the HTC phone seems to score about 25% higher in graphical benches.

Actually I think Snapdragon like 3xes the OMAP in Linpack. But I do not understand why. Quadrant shows the CPUs equivalent.

Android Central might explain this.

One pretty major caveat, however, is that the Linpack test doesn't appear to be working properly with the Droid and Droid 2, both of which use TI OMAP processors. The Nexus One and Evo 4G are scored just fine. You'll see what we mean, and if someone wants to explain things to us, we'll be at the bar.

http://www.androidcentral.com/droid-2-benchmark-tests

Probably improper kernel reading results in faulty reading or something along those lines.