Question Re: Android and Hardware Acceleration on the G1

[tiki]

There has been some speculation that the current version of the
Android OS on the Tmobile G1 is not hardware accelerated- but rather
then transitions and scrolling, etc are handled thru software- thus
one may see a bit of choppiness.

Is this in fact true? And if so, will the next OS update be activating
Hardware Acceleration for Android in general?

Thanks for your time :)

[Dianne Hackborn]

On the G1 hardware acceleration is used for all window compositing and OpenGL drawing.  It is not currently used for rendering inside of a window.  We'd like to support acceleration inside of a window, but this is very tricky to implement (requiring multiple active OpenGL contexts in multiple processes) and not currently scheduled on the roadmap.

--
Dianne Hackborn
Android framework engineer
hac...@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.

[tiki]

Thank you for your reply Dianne

So can I assume that things such as windows transitions, the menu tab
sliding up, and the window shade sliding down are currently
hardware acclerated?

There is a bit of jerkiness in these functions- where would this be
coming from, and is it something that would be addressed/affected in
future OS updates?

Thanks again for your time

On Dec 11, 10:18 pm, "Dianne Hackborn" <hack...@android.com> wrote:
> On the G1 hardware acceleration is used for all window compositing and
> OpenGL drawing.  It is not currently used for rendering inside of a window.
> We'd like to support acceleration inside of a window, but this is very
> tricky to implement (requiring multiple active OpenGL contexts in multiple
> processes) and not currently scheduled on the roadmap.
>

> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 7:14 PM, tiki <tiki...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There has been some speculation that the current version of the
> > Android OS on the Tmobile G1 is not hardware accelerated- but rather
> > then transitions and scrolling, etc are handled thru software- thus
> > one may see a bit of choppiness.
>
> > Is this in fact true? And if so, will the next OS update be activating
> > Hardware Acceleration for Android in general?
>
> > Thanks for your time :)
>
> --
> Dianne Hackborn
> Android framework engineer

> hack...@android.com

[Dianne Hackborn]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 7:58 PM, tiki <tik...@gmail.com> wrote:

So can I assume that things such as windows transitions, the menu tab
sliding up, and the window shade sliding down are currently
hardware acclerated?

Yes.
 

There is a bit of jerkiness in these functions- where would this be
coming from, and is it something that would be addressed/affected in
future OS updates?

Jerkiness where?  They are smooth on my G1.  The window shade can sometimes be a little jerky because when you start dragging it, it needs to update all of the notifications inside before it gets displayed.  I doubt that will change much.

But, you know, feel free to poke around the code and contribute any optimizations you can make.

--
Dianne Hackborn
Android framework engineer

hac...@android.com

[Romain Guy]

The menu tab sliding is NOT hardware accelerated.

--
Romain Guy
www.curious-creature.org

[Surki]

is the android development phone going to ship with the necessary
opengl drivers to utilize hardware acceleration - kernel+userspace?
(well, closed or open, in whatever
form)