The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

Sharp criticism from Charles Ying on Android’s lack of GPU acceleration for UI rendering:

Android has two major technical UX problems: animation performance and touch responsiveness.

Android’s UX architecture needs work. UI compositing and the view system are both primarily done in software. Garbage collection and async operations frequently block UI rendering. […]

Android engineers say that better hardware will eventually solve the problem — an insane rationale for the problem. On mobile, power efficiency is king. Throwing dual cores or more GHz at the problem is just going to get you more average performance with zero battery life, and even then, as long as your screen doesn’t get too big.

★ Monday, 3 January 2011