Related
This is a must-read.
https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/2FXDCz8x93s
I gather a couple of interesting things from this: 1) the ICS OTA will be a drastic improvement over the ICS ROMs we have now, and 2) I thought it interesting how Google will actually improve UI smoothness in the Nexus S by turning OFF hardware acceleration in some areas.
This really clears up a lot of misconceptions and wrong information people around here seem to pass around regarding UI speed and hardware acceleration
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
Good find man, lot of useful info.
From Degobah
Utterly fantastic find, and a must-read for anyone concerned with Android UI performance. It's quite ironic that due to that 8-MB per-process memory hit, it's actually faster for the Nexus S to render parts of the UI in software. I wonder if the same driver limitations are present in iOS, since they use PowerVR GPUs as well.
For reference, I am including Dianne's complete post below.
Dianne Hackborn said:
How about some Android graphics true facts?
I get tired of seeing so much misinformation posted and repeated all over the place about how graphics rendering works on Android. Here is some truth:
• Android has always used some hardware accelerated drawing. Since before 1.0 all window compositing to the display has been done with hardware.
• This means that many of the animations you see have always been hardware accelerated: menus being shown, sliding the notification shade, transitions between activities, pop-ups and dialogs showing and hiding, etc.
• Android did historically use software to render the contents of each window. For example in a UI like http://www.simplemobilereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/2-home-menu.png there are four windows: the status bar, the wallpaper, the launcher on top of the wallpaper, and the menu. If one of the windows updates its contents, such as highlighting a menu item, then (prior to 3.0) software is used to draw the new contents of that window; however none of the other windows are redrawn at all, and the re-composition of the windows is done in hardware. Likewise, any movement of the windows such as the menu going up and down is all hardware rendering.
• Looking at drawing inside of a window, you don’t necessarily need to do this in hardware to achieve full 60fps rendering. This depends very much on the number of pixels in your display and the speed of your CPU. For example, Nexus S has no trouble doing 60fps rendering of all the normal stuff you see in the Android UI like scrolling lists on its 800x480 screen. The original Droid however struggled with a similar screen resolution.
• "Full" hardware accelerated drawing within a window was added in Android 3.0. The implementation in Android 4.0 is not any more full than in 3.0. Starting with 3.0, if you set the flag in your app saying that hardware accelerated drawing is allowed, then all drawing to the application’s windows will be done with the GPU. The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default rather than having to put android:handwareAccelerated="true" in their manifest. (And the reason this isn’t just turned on for all existing applications is that some types of drawing operations can’t be supported well in hardware and it also impacts the behavior when an application asks to have a part of its UI updated. Forcing hardware accelerated drawing upon existing apps will break a significant number of them, from subtly to significantly.)
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not all full of win. For example on the PVR drivers of devices like the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, simply starting to use OpenGL in a process eats about 8MB of RAM. Given that our process overhead is about 2MB, this is pretty huge. That RAM takes away from other things, such as the number of background processes that can be kept running, potentially slowing down things like app switching.
• Because of the overhead of OpenGL, one may very well not want to use it for drawing. For example some of the work we are doing to make Android 4.0 run well on the Nexus S has involved turning off hardware accelerated drawing in parts of the UI so we don’t lose 8MB of RAM in the system process, another 8MB in the phone process, another 8MB in the system UI process, etc. Trust me, you won’t notice -- there is just no benefit on that device in using OpenGL to draw something like the status bar, even with fancy animations going on in there.
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not a magical silver bullet to butter-smooth UI. There are many different efforts that have been going on towards this, such as improved scheduling of foreground vs. background threads in 1.6, rewriting the input system in 2.3, strict mode, concurrent garbage collection, loaders, etc. If you want to achieve 60fps, you have 20 milliseconds to handle each frame. This is not a lot of time. Just touching the flash storage system in the thread that is running the UI can in some cases introduce a delay that puts you out of that timing window, especially if you are writing to storage.
• A recent example of the kinds of interesting things that impact UI smoothness: we noticed that ICS on Nexus S was actually less smooth when scrolling through lists than it was on Gingerbread. It turned out that the reason for this was due to subtle changes in timing, so that sometimes in ICS as the app was retrieving touch events and drawing the screen, it would go to get the next event slightly before it was ready, causing it to visibly miss a frame while tracking the finger even though it was drawing the screen at a solid 60fps.
• When people have historically compared web browser scrolling between Android and iOS, most of the differences they are seeing are not due to hardware accelerated drawing. Originally Android went a different route for its web page rendering and made different compromises: the web page is turned in to a display list, which is continually rendered to the screen, instead of using tiles. This has the benefit that scrolling and zooming never have artifacts of tiles that haven’t yet been drawn. Its downside is that as the graphics on the web page get more complicated to draw the frame rate goes down. As of Android 3.0, the browser now uses tiles, so it can maintain a consistent frame rate as you scroll or zoom, with the negative of having artifacts when newly needed tiles can’t be rendered quickly enough. The tiles themselves are rendered in software, which I believe is the case for iOS as well. (And this tile-based approach could be used prior to 3.0 without hardware accelerated drawing; as mentioned previously, the Nexus S CPU can easily draw the tiles to the window at 60fps.)
• Hardware accleration does not magically make drawing performance problems disappear. There is still a limit to how much the GPU can do. A recent interesting example of this is tablets built with Tegra 2 -- that GPU can touch every pixel of a 1024x800 screen about 2.5 times at 60fps. Now consider the Android 3.0 tablet home screen where you are switching to the all apps list: you need to draw the background (1x all pixels), then the layer of shortcuts and widgets (let’s be nice and say this is .5x all pixels), then the black background of all apps (1x all pixels), and the icons and labels of all apps (.5x all pixels). We’ve already blown our per-pixel budget, and we haven’t even composited the separate windows to the final display yet. To get 60fps animation, Android 3.0 and later use a number of tricks. A big one is that it tries to put all windows into overlays instead of having to copy them to the framebuffer with the GPU. In the case here even with that we are still over-budget, but we have another trick: because the wallpaper on Android is in a separate window, we can make this window larger than the screen to hold the entire bitmap. Now, as you scroll, the movement of the background doesn’t require any drawing, just moving its window... and because this window is in an overlay, it doesn’t even need to be composited to the screen with the GPU.
• As device screen resolution goes up, achieving a 60fps UI is closely related to GPU speed and especially the GPU’s memory bus bandwidth. In fact, if you want to get an idea of the performance of a piece of hardware, always pay close attention to the memory bus bandwidth. There are plenty of times where the CPU (especially with those wonderful NEON instructions) can go a lot faster than the memory bus.
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Skimmed through it but it seems that its a compromise to free RAM but not really to speed up performance. Maybe faster app switching but not scrolling, animations, etc. Hopefully the Galaxy Nexus comes to Sprint.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
Award Tour said:
Skimmed through it but it seems that its a compromise to free RAM but not really to speed up performance. Maybe faster app switching but not scrolling, animations, etc. Hopefully the Galaxy Nexus comes to Sprint.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
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Click to collapse
1) Faster app-switching IS improved performance.
2) Maybe you skimmed past this part?
"A recent example of the kinds of interesting things that impact UI smoothness: we noticed that ICS on Nexus S was actually less smooth when scrolling through lists than it was on Gingerbread. It turned out that the reason for this was due to subtle changes in timing, so that sometimes in ICS as the app was retrieving touch events and drawing the screen, it would go to get the next event slightly before it was ready, causing it to visibly miss a frame while tracking the finger even though it was drawing the screen at a solid 60fps."
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
matt2053 said:
1) Faster app-switching IS improved performance.
2) Maybe you skimmed past this part?
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Click to collapse
Freeing RAM to allow more background processes and faster app switching would mean (app launching) performance that is no better than what we already have. With ICS and the anticipation of HW acceleration, we all wanted BETTER INTERACTIVE performance. From playing around with it on the AOSP build, I can clearly see its faster than 2.3 on that regard. I experience constant app relaunching, much more than 2.3 so maybe that's what Google is talking about. But Google scaling GPU acceleration back because of RAM limitations is kind of disappointing to me but understandable.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
thnx for posting this again. I have read his post a while ago. And it was very informative. I am beginning to understand Android more. And I'm beginning to get more excited with the upcoming ICS update for our phone.
Award Tour said:
Freeing RAM to allow more background processes and faster app switching would mean performance that is no better than what we already have. With ICS and the anticipation of HW acceleration, we all wanted BETTER INTERACTIVE performance. From playing around with it on the AOSP build, I can clearly see its faster than 2.3 on that regard. I experience constant app relaunching, much more than 2.3 so maybe that's what Google is talking about. But Google scaling that back because of RAM limitations is kind of disappointing to me but understandable.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
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Yeah, I think the constant app re-launching is exactly what they are trying to fix by limiting the HW acceleration.
There are also several comments from other members of the Android team about how they are regularly blown away by how well the Nexus S Hummingbird processor handles SW rendering, and that it does so with such ease that you won't notice the difference, because it will be a steady 60 fps, and 60 fps is 60 fps to the user.
But the main thing that I think is important to take away from reading the post is that Google seems to know exactly wtf they're doing in this area, and they're doing a lot of work perfecting ICS performance on the Nexus S before they release it. So anyone who has felt disappointment regarding performance of ICS on the Nexus S so far can be assured that their apprehensions are indeed premature, and the Google team is keenly aware of the exact same performance issues that have been noted in this forum.
Plus they want it perfect on Nexus S because that seems to be the phone most Googlers personally own and use
Because of the overhead of OpenGL, one may very well not want to use it for drawing. For example some of the work we are doing to make Android 4.0 run well on the Nexus S has involved turning off hardware accelerated drawing in parts of the UI so we don’t lose 8MB of RAM in the system process, another 8MB in the phone process, another 8MB in the system UI process, etc. Trust me, you won’t notice -- there is just no benefit on that device in using OpenGL to draw something like the status bar, even with fancy animations going on in there.
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Click to collapse
good enough explanation for me. So we can expect a better performing ICS for our nexus S. I am always pissed on how my nexus running on an alpha ICS rom can have a very very slow and painful app switching.
matt2053 said:
Yeah, I think the constant app re-launching is exactly what they are trying to fix by limiting the HW acceleration.
There are also several comments from other members of the Android team about how they are regularly blown away by how well the Nexus S Hummingbird processor handles SW rendering, and that it does so with such ease that you won't notice the difference, because it will be a steady 60 fps, and 60 fps is 60 fps to the user.
But the main thing that I think is important to take away from reading the post is that Google seems to know exactly wtf they're doing in this area, and they're doing a lot of work perfecting ICS performance on the Nexus S before they release it. So anyone who has felt disappointment regarding performance of ICS on the Nexus S so far can be assured that their apprehensions are indeed premature, and the Google team is keenly aware of the exact same performance issues that have been noted in this forum.
Plus they want it perfect on Nexus S because that seems to be the phone most Googlers personally own and use
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know about you but third party apps with hardware acceleration on is visibly more smooth than the same app on 2.3. Night and day difference. I wonder how much of it they're scaling back. Its too bad that you can't easily upgrade RAM on a phone.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
Award Tour said:
I don't know about you but third party apps with hardware acceleration on is visibly more smooth than the same app on 2.3. Night and day difference. I wonder how much of it they're scaling back. Its too bad that you can't easily upgrade RAM on a phone.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
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Click to collapse
I didn't get from her post that hardware rendering within app windows would be disabled. Just that certain parts of the UI will be drawn with software executed by the CPU.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
Good read! Thanks for posting
Not bad
Thx
matt2053 said:
This is a must-read.
https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/2FXDCz8x93s
I gather a couple of interesting things from this: 1) the ICS OTA will be a drastic improvement over the ICS ROMs we have now, and 2) I thought it interesting how Google will actually improve UI smoothness in the Nexus S by turning OFF hardware acceleration in some areas.
This really clears up a lot of misconceptions and wrong information people around here seem to pass around regarding UI speed and hardware acceleration
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the info
Sent from my Nexus S 4G using xda premium
My comments, since I do some graphics work professionally:
Either I'm reading this wrong or Android has an extremely stupid rendering design. I do professional embedded GL graphics (and some Qt) so I'm not up to date with the Android framework yet:
* Why isn't drawing a client-server model where all draw commands are funneled to a unified multi-threaded draw server? That way, each app doesn't need a 8MB chunk of driver memory (which is stupid in itself already especially on embedded, Windows Mobile, Qt on Windows Mobile, etc). Only full-screen apps should have direct rendering to the framebuffer. Android is already suffering from draw consistency, resource contention by allowing each app to direct render. C-S would separate touch event contention from drawing contention that each Android app suffers from and why iOS has smoother UI.
* Why isn't Android using a multi-process scene-graph (each app is a item, and then each item has multiple sub-graphs per app) so Android can not only retain what needs to be drawn per global animation updates, but can instantly and easily cull unnecessary updates per app. Putting each app into an overlay isn't the best way to go without this culling.
* Why isn't Android using "dirty-regions" as another way to cull necessary updates (I assume this is what tiles are)? It should be since its a standard technique that dates back to QuickDraw and QuickDraw II, besides MS's windows API.
* With the pixel-overdraw bandwidth issue, Android can easily first cull through the scene-graph, then the per-app dirty-regions (or stencil buffer*), and then use the hardware-accelerated *depthbuffer to eliminate more overdraw, and draw front-to-back. This is just simplified because there's more modern GL tricks for culling. So, Android shouldn't have to touch each displayed pixel more than once.
* Is Android using pixelshaders at all to accelerate standard widgets such as buttons, etc? There's no reason to have large simplified buttons that can't be replicated by instanced models with pixel-shaders in a scene-graph.
Maybe Android should switch to the Unreal Engine for drawing instead, or some other modern game engine. These are all solved issues. Android has hardware that's generations more performant than the old game systems, but a software engine that's generations behind.
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lol in other words no iOS smoothness for us fail I hope ICS hooks up my nexus s tho
NuShrike said:
Maybe Android should switch to the Unreal Engine for drawing instead, or some other modern game engine. These are all solved issues. Android has hardware that's generations more performant than the old game systems, but a software engine that's generations behind.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Aye, I agree with you there!!!!!
NuShrike said:
My comments, since I do some graphics work professionally:
Either I'm reading this wrong or Android has an extremely stupid rendering design. I do professional embedded GL graphics (and some Qt) so I'm not up to date with the Android framework yet:
* Why isn't drawing a client-server model where all draw commands are funneled to a unified multi-threaded draw server? That way, each app doesn't need a 8MB chunk of driver memory (which is stupid in itself already especially on embedded, Windows Mobile, Qt on Windows Mobile, etc). Only full-screen apps should have direct rendering to the framebuffer. Android is already suffering from draw consistency, resource contention by allowing each app to direct render. C-S would separate touch event contention from drawing contention that each Android app suffers from and why iOS has smoother UI.
* Why isn't Android using a multi-process scene-graph (each app is a item, and then each item has multiple sub-graphs per app) so Android can not only retain what needs to be drawn per global animation updates, but can instantly and easily cull unnecessary updates per app. Putting each app into an overlay isn't the best way to go without this culling.
* Why isn't Android using "dirty-regions" as another way to cull necessary updates (I assume this is what tiles are)? It should be since its a standard technique that dates back to QuickDraw and QuickDraw II, besides MS's windows API.
* With the pixel-overdraw bandwidth issue, Android can easily first cull through the scene-graph, then the per-app dirty-regions (or stencil buffer*), and then use the hardware-accelerated *depthbuffer to eliminate more overdraw, and draw front-to-back. This is just simplified because there's more modern GL tricks for culling. So, Android shouldn't have to touch each displayed pixel more than once.
* Is Android using pixelshaders at all to accelerate standard widgets such as buttons, etc? There's no reason to have large simplified buttons that can't be replicated by instanced models with pixel-shaders in a scene-graph.
Maybe Android should switch to the Unreal Engine for drawing instead, or some other modern game engine. These are all solved issues. Android has hardware that's generations more performant than the old game systems, but a software engine that's generations behind.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In case anyone wonders, this was Romain Guy's reply to the questions above:
"We use dirty regions and overdraw would not be eliminated through the use of a depth buffer since pretty much everything drawn by apps requires blending. We user fragment shaders and instanced models already. Apps don't have access to the framebuffer, they draw inside what we call a "surface" which is basically an OpenGL texture used by a separate process (the window compositor.) Android 3.0 already moves towards a full scene graph approach by keeping a tree of display lists (one per View) inside each window."
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barmanham said:
lol in other words no iOS smoothness for us fail I hope ICS hooks up my nexus s tho
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Click to collapse
I don't even consider iOS that smooth. Multitasking and app switching in that OS is a big pain. My IP4 and iPod touch 4th slows down a lot when multitasking. To a point that it freezes for seconds.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
I posted with my girls pre 2 and the multitasking in that is perfect
Sent from Oxygen 2.3.2 powered Nexus S 4G
The main complains I read about for the Nexus 10 stem from the extra high res display.
Would it possible... or dangerous... to have the option to lower the resolution when you do not need it so high?
1920x1200 would maintain the 16:10 ratio and still have a high res, but battery life and overall speed would surely improve greatly.
Anyone know of any reason I should not experiment with this?
OldGaf said:
The main complains I read about for the Nexus 10 stem from the extra high res display.
Would it possible... or dangerous... to have the option to lower the resolution when you do not need it so high?
1920x1200 would maintain the 16:10 ratio and still have a high res, but battery life and overall speed would surely improve greatly.
Anyone know of any reason I should not experiment with this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Does it even work that way? You're still pushing a resolution of 2560x1600 regardless.
Actually just found this:
LCDDensity for Root
Does this work with N10?
Not sure how it would be dangerous to lower the res but wouldn't the picture quality degrade if you do this?
If you do this on a regular pc lcd monitor, everything looks like a turd.
404 ERROR said:
Does it even work that way? You're still pushing a resolution of 2560x1600 regardless.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know... I am wondering if it would be like a PC... games run slower the higher you push the resolution.
But it may now work the same way with tablets...
OldGaf said:
Actually just found this:
LCDDensity for Root
Does this work with N10?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's just for changing the PPI. Something like how PA works. You'll just end up getting a smaller or larger version of the app.
There's nothing wrong with the resolution. Overall speed is top notch and battery life is pretty good. Most of the complaints are because of Chrome. Chrome itself is the problem though.
Don't worry dude.
To my knowledge, you can't directly modify what resolution the device runs at easily. You can change screen DPI easily, but not resolution (most, if not all apps only change DPI).
For example, changing the N10 DPI from 320 to 400 will make the UI look bigger, but games and everything else will still be running at native resolution, so essentially no performance change.
I imagine editing the resolution directly would require some source-code modification on either a ROM or Kernel level, or maybe even LCD driver, but I have no idea.
In any case, the N10 is fine at the resolution it's at, but a few non-optimized apps may not run ideally. I would say the CPU architecture is more to blame though instead of the screen resolution.
chimpknowskungfu said:
Not sure how it would be dangerous to lower the res but wouldn't the picture quality degrade if you do this?
If you do this on a regular pc lcd monitor, everything looks like a turd.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know how bad it would look.... it is a small screen so would think it would not be as bad as on a 22+ monitor.
I am still waiting on my N10 so can't try it yet.
espionage724 said:
To my knowledge, you can't directly modify what resolution the device runs at easily. You can change screen DPI easily, but not resolution (most, if not all apps only change DPI).
For example, changing the N10 DPI from 320 to 400 will make the UI look bigger, but games and everything else will still be running at native resolution, so essentially no performance change.
I imagine editing the resolution directly would require some source-code modification on either a ROM or Kernel level, or maybe even LCD driver, but I have no idea.
In any case, the N10 is fine at the resolution it's at, but a few non-optimized apps may not run ideally. I would say the CPU architecture is more to blame though instead of the screen resolution.
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Oh well .... was just a thought.
Thanks all for your input / info.
OldGaf said:
Oh well .... was just a thought.
Thanks all for your input / info.
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I love this resolution nothing wrong with it battery also fine , don't listen to ppl who looking for reason not to like this tablet ,
I use ocean browser its works fine!
johnyguy said:
I love this resolution nothing wrong with it battery also fine , don't listen to ppl who looking for reason not to like this tablet ,
I use ocean browser its works fine!
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Just..... can't...... wait...... is it Wednesday yet?
OldGaf said:
Just..... can't...... wait...... is it Wednesday yet?
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Today is Friday.
I use to have the Acer iconia A500 as well this thing is faster thinner. Lighter much nicer screen . stronger Wi-Fi radio than Acer.
johnyguy said:
Today is Friday.
I use to have the Acer iconia A500 as well this thing is faster thinner. Lighter much nicer screen . stronger Wi-Fi radio than Acer.
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Click to collapse
Good to know. Reading reviews is not like having the real deal. This is the first purchase I made without holding one in my hands first.
Are there any apps you ran on the A500 that you could not / would not on the N10 ?
OldGaf said:
I don't know... I am wondering if it would be like a PC... games run slower the higher you push the resolution.
But it may now work the same way with tablets...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is definitely true for games. Graphics intensive 3d games, like Shadowgun Deadzone, have a hard time running at native resolution on the Nexus 10. The game renders at native resolution even on the lowest graphics settings. Most maps are playable, but some have a really hard time. On an LCD display, the only way to scale back resolution, and still look reasonable, is to run at 1/2 resolution (4 pixels get rendered as 1). When the iPad 3 came out, many devs chose to continue rendering their games at 1024x768 to keep performance acceptable.
What would really help, is a way to fool a 3d game into rendering at 1/2 resolution. Playing at 1280x800 would still look great, especially if 4x MSAA was enabled.
bioorganic said:
This is definitely true for games. Graphics intensive 3d games, like Shadowgun Deadzone, have a hard time running at native resolution on the Nexus 10. The game renders at native resolution even on the lowest graphics settings. Most maps are playable, but some have a really hard time. On an LCD display, the only way to scale back resolution, and still look reasonable, is to run at 1/2 resolution (4 pixels get rendered as 1). When the iPad 3 came out, many devs chose to continue rendering their games at 1024x768 to keep performance acceptable.
What would really help, is a way to fool a 3d game into rendering at 1/2 resolution. Playing at 1280x800 would still look great, especially if 4x MSAA was enabled.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If a game does not run well it is because the game is coded terribly, not because the resolution is too high. If we were able to lower the res it would help performance, but that is just a band-aid on the real issue of the developer not doing a good job with whatever they made. The GPU is running at its max potential, but it has enough power and bandwidth at stock speed that it can render any game that is properly made at 30fps.
DEAD TRIGGER has an option in a config file for screen resolution. I might imagine editing this file would tell the game to render at a lower resolution, but I'm not entirely sure. In any case, not entirely sure if any other game would have such a config file or resolution setting either.
GTA III has an option for screen resolution conveniently in it's in-game options. Setting it at 100% does cause a noticeable drop in FPS. Setting it to about 50% allows for (imo) playable, high FPS, without too much of a drop in overall quality. Pretty sure GTA III is just not "as optimized" as it can be though.
EniGmA1987 said:
If a game does not run well it is because the game is coded terribly, not because the resolution is too high. If we were able to lower the res it would help performance, but that is just a band-aid on the real issue of the developer not doing a good job with whatever they made. The GPU is running at its max potential, but it has enough power and bandwidth at stock speed that it can render any game that is properly made at 30fps.
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Click to collapse
I respectfully disagree. Running the original Doom, or Crysis, at 2560x1600 are two dramatically different things. Does that make Crysis terribly coded if it doesn't run well on your hardware at that resolution? For pure aesthetics, I'll take a playable Crysis at 1280x800 over Doom at 2560x1600. I suppose using Doom in that example was not so appropriate given that it was programmed by God himself.
Given the tiny fraction of the mobile market that 2560x1600 makes up, I think it's pretty unlikely that we'll see games optimized for that resolution. Adding a 1/2 res setting for games seems like a far easier solution.
bioorganic said:
I respectfully disagree. Running the original Doom, or Crysis, at 2560x1600 are two dramatically different things. Does that make Crysis terribly coded if it doesn't run well on your hardware at that resolution? For pure aesthetics, I'll take a playable Crysis at 1280x800 over Doom at 2560x1600. I suppose using Doom in that example was not so appropriate given that it was programmed by God himself.
Given the tiny fraction of the mobile market that 2560x1600 makes up, I think it's pretty unlikely that we'll see games optimized for that resolution. Adding a 1/2 res setting for games seems like a far easier solution.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Crysis is terribly coded.
Games can be terribly coded which makes them run slower than they're supposed to.
bioorganic said:
I respectfully disagree. Running the original Doom, or Crysis, at 2560x1600 are two dramatically different things. Does that make Crysis terribly coded if it doesn't run well on your hardware at that resolution? For pure aesthetics, I'll take a playable Crysis at 1280x800 over Doom at 2560x1600. I suppose using Doom in that example was not so appropriate given that it was programmed by God himself.
Given the tiny fraction of the mobile market that 2560x1600 makes up, I think it's pretty unlikely that we'll see games optimized for that resolution. Adding a 1/2 res setting for games seems like a far easier solution.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I know that two games can have very different loads on the system, but if you look at all the tech doc's for the device the Mali 604 graphics processor has enough power and bandwidth to just barely push 30 fps @ 2560x1600 with properly coded apps. So if something is not coded well, it will not be able to reach proper frames per second to run smooth on this device. Optimizing for a resolution and have optimized code are very different things.
Hi,
Have you ever noticed that when you scroll for exemple internet pages there is a little deformation of the image ? Like the text were warping, and especialy in portrait mod.
Take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-tKflikYY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Do you know if it's hardware or software problem ?
I was wondering the same thing. It's due to how LCDs refresh, top to bottom, line by line. Given the fact that our display is so dense with pixels, and the GPU isn't extremely powerful (it's a tablet after all), this is bound to happen.
It also happens on iPads, so don't think it's exclusive to the N10.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using xda app-developers app
I noticed this too back when I had my N10. It was very pronounced when scrolling in portrait mode. I thought it was another flaw until I had to go back to the HP Touchpad (running android) and noticed it too. But it was very hard to see on the Touchpad. Like stated before, its because it is pushing all those pixels.
It's not really disturbing but, i don't know if it could ever be fixed or we just have to deal with it...
I had a little freak out about this when I first got my N10. I had it on my galaxy tab 7+ and thought it was just an issue with that tablet, turns out its the refresh point of the screen and some people are really sensitive to it.
Anyone know if phone screens refresh top to bottom in portrait mode while tab screens refresh top to bottom in landscape mode?
Sent from my Nexus 10 using Tapatalk HD
I always thought that would be part of the butter project?
Has to do with the combination of a very high resolution screen with a gpu that is not strong enough or optimized to power it. You didnt see this issue at all in the ipad 2 but did see it (albeit slightly) in the ipad 3 due to the huge increase in screen resolution from the ipad 2. The issue is also not in the ipad 4 at all, the increase in gpu performance stopped it from happening. The issue is pretty prevalent in our nexus 10s and I definitely notice it but its not as jarring after awhile.
are google going to "optimise" this then? it is rather annoying
That's pretty weird. I've been using my Nexus 10 since early December, and never saw or experienced anything like this. The youtube video also looks pretty strange to me -- I don't have any of the lag in scrolling that is apparent in that video. In the video it appears that something is really eating up cycles in either the CPU, GPU or both. My own N10 appears to be much faster -- no lag or delay like the video shows, and none of the deforming or skewing that shows on the video either.
What are you guys looking at that "deforms" when you scroll? Do you developer options enabled that might affect video performance, e.g., Transition animation scale modified, Animator duration scale, Disable HW overlays? Having trouble reconciling my own experience with the youtube video and what I'm reading in this thread. I can't duplicate any of it on my end, regardless of the website or document I'm browsing or scrolling over...
Nitemare3219 said:
I was wondering the same thing. It's due to how LCDs refresh, top to bottom, line by line. Given the fact that our display is so dense with pixels, and the GPU isn't extremely powerful (it's a tablet after all), this is bound to happen.
It also happens on iPads, so don't think it's exclusive to the N10.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using xda app-developers app
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Its not so much because of the GPU. Its the screen limited by the 60hz refresh rate. This can be seen on a desktop if the monitor is in portrait mode and you can find a page that with scroll @ 60fps.
I downloaded the new D Day game on my Nexus 10 and the iPad Mini. Why does the game to play so much faster so much smoother so much better on the mini rather than my Nexus 10? How can the mini that has such Lower specs play it so much better and this is what other games also I'm running stock rom with custom kernel. I really want you like my Nexus can but if the mini or anything else plays games better and may have to switch what can I do to see if substantial difference in this. any advice, tweaks, tips would be greatly appreciated thank you
Short answer: Developers are lazy
Long answer: The iPad Mini is pushing a lower-resolution and thus, 3D applications don't put as much strain on available graphics resources. The Nexus 10 is pushing 2560x1600, which is pretty aggressive, and developers need to fine-tune their apps, as to not choke the available bandwidth. Most developers just simply lower the internal game resolution, but this may not be enough depending on other factors.
Other factors might include, since iOS is only available to a few devices, and Android covering, a lot more, the developer may of either chosen to test the game on only one device not-related to the Nexus 10, and may not even be aware of it having performance issues on the Nexus 10 (in which case, you should alert the developer at some point).
espionage724 said:
Short answer: Developers are lazy
Long answer: The iPad Mini is pushing a lower-resolution and thus, 3D applications don't put as much strain on available graphics resources. The Nexus 10 is pushing 2560x1600, which is pretty aggressive, and developers need to fine-tune their apps, as to not choke the available bandwidth. Most developers just simply lower the internal game resolution, but this may not be enough depending on other factors.
Other factors might include, since iOS is only available to a few devices, and Android covering, a lot more, the developer may of either chosen to test the game on only one device not-related to the Nexus 10, and may not even be aware of it having performance issues on the Nexus 10 (in which case, you should alert the developer at some point).
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Thank you for your reply...that makes sense to me...will the devs ever really catch up with this ? I just wonder since its the highest resolution tablet yet. I just installed carbon room and I'm very happy with the general ui speed now, I'm going to try a few games also with it to see if there is any difference...
Are there any settings in the Dev options that I need to change to help also?
Thanks again
Edit...I just tried that new dday game again and still very laggy....yuck..
Some people recommend enabling 4xMSAA for OpenGLES 2.0 apps (named something like that anyway). Another popular option is to enable Forced 2D GPU acceleration.
A lot of games start off on the iOS platform. Then it seems they will do the bare minimum to port it over to android.
hlaalu said:
A lot of games start off on the iOS platform. Then it seems they will do the bare minimum to port it over to android.
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This. And you think it would be the opposite, since android has more devices on the planet than iOS.
KCHawkeye02 said:
This. And you think it would be the opposite, since android has more devices on the planet than iOS.
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You'd think right? But honestly, having a ridiculous number of manufacturers, with different hardware on different versions probably scares a lot of developers away. Its much easier to make a game for a single piece of hardware and os.
[Rant]I love how android is open source but in the future I hope they at least set some standards for hardware to help unify android and prevent these crappy companies slapping together leftover hardware and throwing on whatever android os will run. [/rant]
The dev is probably lazy. Epic Citadel, one of the most demanding games, run at 54fps on the Nexus 10 at full quality. I wonder how the iPad mini will handle it, but I'm highlighting my developer-is-lazy point.
Ipad minis form screen size factor its simply perfect . light and premium materials makes it an incredible device . but the deal braker its the IOS .
I ve had a ipad mini on my hands 3 days . battery holds 12 hours with average use .
The PERFECT TABLET IN THE UNIVERSE would be ->
IPAD MINI WITH ANDROID , TEGRA 4 AND SAMSUNG CPU !!
Sent from my Nexus 10 using xda app-developers app
dvigue said:
I downloaded the new D Day game on my Nexus 10 and the iPad Mini. Why does the game to play so much faster so much smoother so much better on the mini rather than my Nexus 10? How can the mini that has such Lower specs play it so much better and this is what other games also I'm running stock rom with custom kernel. I really want you like my Nexus can but if the mini or anything else plays games better and may have to switch what can I do to see if substantial difference in this. any advice, tweaks, tips would be greatly appreciated thank you
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With the correct Governor/Scheduler/ROM/software tweaks it can be as good/even better than the Ipad. As I have mentioned before, my wife has an Ipad 4 and I find her snatching up my n10 if I put it down around her. She is an Apple fan-girl but she definitely sees the appeal of android, and she loves my Nexus 10. I will be the first to admit that Real Racing 3 gets higher framerates on her Ipad 4 but it is still smooth on my Nexus 10 and isn't much of a surprise seeing as it was developed on iOS originally and is just a port.
EDIT: I am using the MAX graphics mod with RR3 so the graphics are identical to the Ipad 4.
A tegra 4 and a samsung cpu? Confused...
Also I hate the ipad 4x3 aspect ratio...
My perfect tab would be the nexus 10 with the exynos 5 octa... And a samoLED screen with the 5250x1600 res and Wacom digitizer
The problem its that the mini iPad has higher frame rate than my nexus 10 also ... Not the iPad 4
The aspect ratio on iPad mini its perfect . its very light . nexus 10 its a brick compare to that . that its a portable device ...
Tegra 4 or a a GPU powerful like with an Samsung CPU and an aluminum case ... Nexus 10 case its like a old granny chair ... Squeaky, crackle ...
Sent from my Nexus 10 using xda app-developers app
brees75 said:
With the correct Governor/Scheduler/ROM/software tweaks it can be as good/even better than the Ipad.
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can you share your settings for the best performance? i am on Francos kernal if that helps also..
i would LOVE to tweak my N10 to the max before i make my decision on which to keep
Try out Trinity Kernel instead, it is far better performing now than Franco's. It has the best stock performance at the moment without changing any settings around.
Or you can try the KTManta kernel and use the Ktoonservative governor with these settings:
cpu boost level - 800
gpu boost level - 533
boost cycles - 7
disable hotplugging - 1
sample time - 30000
sample time with screen off - 90000
down threshold - 30
hotplug down - 29
up threshold - 75
up hotplug - 80
And then make sure you have force 2D GPU in the developer options turned on.
Any scheduler should be fine, but I have seen that Zen gives both good read and write speed.
If you do some undervolting you can get a lot better battery life too. Just remember that the GPU needs to have its voltage set to a multiple of 25 for each step.
Hello all, one of the main reasons why i chose the xperia z1 compact over a galaxy s5 by then was that i knew that z1 compact had much more power to spare for future gaming thanks to the low screen resolution, It was very hard for me to choose this time galaxy s6 over z5 compact for the same reason, but i succumbed to the bigger better oled screen this time around even though i was upset at the senseless screen resolution of 1440 x 2560 which made it clear that the phone would struggle with current high end games to keep 60fps let alone future games...
Well after playing Dead Trigger 2 with all gfx on max surprise surprise, the phone could not keep up with its absurd screen resolution a steady 60fps so i started thinking if there was a proper screen res changer tool this time around as i was a bit familiar with some of them in the past which done a poor job and many times left the phone unusuable thx to the resolution affecting the OS itself aswell.
Well guess what, Samsung woke up and presented galaxy s6 owners (and some other high end galaxy models) with a very nice solution.
Its called Game Tuner, officially made by Samsung and you can find it here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.android.gametuner.thin&hl=pt_PT
What it does is exactly what all the games should have in the first place, options to choose resolution for your game without changing the resolution for your OS GUI, on top of that, you have a nice control panel profile system which allows you to setup different settings for different games installed in your phone, this apps benefits you with the following:
1)Lower graphics resolution for any games of your choosing,
2) It allows you to even force 3D games which are running at a lower resolution than your screen to actually run at highest resolution supported by your screen,
3)It also allows you to lock FPS to 30 instead of 60 if you would like to preserve some battery life.
4)Allows you some brightness control per game.
Here are the more confusing settings explained:
High (turns all games to the highest resolution of the phone screen) almost impossible to observe pixelization
Medium (turns all games to a tad lower res (i believe 1920*1080) difficult to observe pixelization
Low (turns all games to an even lower res( i believe 1270*720) pixelization visible but not too ugly
Extreme Low (turns all games to the lowest resolution possible (i believe 840*472) as i see alot of pixelization
Custom (Allows you to select each game with a specific profile (high, medium, low, extreme low).
Now you can fully enjoy that 2k screen without reprecussions!
Give it a try and have fun!
EDIT: If any questions feel free to ask and ill try to help as i can.
Wow, thanks for sharing. Works great. You can even specify the resolution, fps and brightness per game.
Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-G920F met Tapatalk
NP, glad you like it, updated thread with more information and corrected some grammar issues.
You can already find this in the S6 themes and apps section. No need to post this here
Thanks, this is really cool. I wouldn't have seen it if you hadn't posted it here! I wish it would actually tell you what resolution each of the settings are. I tried taking a screenshot in game after I enabled it and then checking the "details" in gallery but it still said 2560*1440.
Now I'd like to know how I can completely disable it? It seems even after uninstall the settings remain. I'd like to now bypass the 60FPS limit.
lite426 said:
Thanks, this is really cool. I wouldn't have seen it if you hadn't posted it here! I wish it would actually tell you what resolution each of the settings are. I tried taking a screenshot in game after I enabled it and then checking the "details" in gallery but it still said 2560*1440.
Now I'd like to know how I can completely disable it? It seems even after uninstall the settings remain. I'd like to now bypass the 60FPS limit.
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The settings wont remain after uninstalling, i say this because i tried it myself by setting a game to lowest resolution possible and after uninstalling it rolled back to normal, many people believe that, without modding, all games will run by default on the highest resolution supported by your screen, this is a false assumption, and you can easelly notice that with games such as Asphalt 8 and Real Racing 3.
Indeed it should specify resolution instead of "very low, low, med, high," thats why the thread settings are nothing more but assumptions.
Also setting it to MED is considered the default setting for said game in this app so maybe med is actually the default app resolution.
crzykiller said:
You can already find this in the S6 themes and apps section. No need to post this here
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Well, i think it doesn't stress anybody, but the opposite: more users will know about it. It seems this app is not that popular, many users have no idea about it (i found it a couple of weeks ago by mistake in playstore).
The app should receive more coverage in media too. This will be a win-win situation for all, and maybe samsung will add a system-wide option for resolution change (yeah, keep dreaming)
I believe beying able to choose fullscreen resolution of your phone shouldve been a thing implemented by default, im Really happy that samsung thinked of this for my S6 as i can play games like dead effect 2 with extreme graphics but reduced resolution (almost imperceptible pixelization) and get a rock steady 60fps, the only strange thing it semms that it is happening is that after a level or two the game starts to loose performance, other users also reported this issue, samsung will hopefully fix it in the next app update.
TheWarKeeper said:
I believe beying able to choose fullscreen resolution of your phone shouldve been a thing implemented by default, im Really happy that samsung thinked of this for my S6 as i can play games like dead effect 2 with extreme graphics but reduced resolution (almost imperceptible pixelization) and get a rock steady 60fps, the only strange thing it semms that it is happening is that after a level or two the game starts to loose performance, other users also reported this issue, samsung will hopefully fix it in the next app update.
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I think you should also disable DVFS for optimal performance gains.
vnvman said:
I think you should also disable DVFS for optimal performance gains.
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Yes that would increase performance but its a heavy risk considering you might burn up ur cpu or gpu and void the warranty
TheWarKeeper said:
Yes that would increase performance but its a heavy risk considering you might burn up ur cpu or gpu and void the warranty
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I may be wrong but I assume unless you game all day long it shouldn't make too much of a difference in terms of lifespan (assuming one swaps phone every 2 years or so), pretty much like OC/OV.
vnvman said:
I may be wrong but I assume unless you game all day long it shouldn't make too much of a difference in terms of lifespan (assuming one swaps phone every 2 years or so), pretty much like OC/OV.
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Indeed OC reduces lifespan of said component but the problem is more serious than that, if you disable the throttle the GPU or CPU might overheat, it depends on the phone and the chips inside and also the heat dissipation quality which can range from different thermal pastes to different heatsinks and to where is that heat transfered after that, its a risk of hardware damage without knowing its internal chips temps.
But thats just me who knows maybe im wrong.
TheWarKeeper said:
Indeed OC reduces lifespan of said component but the problem is more serious than that, if you disable the throttle the GPU or CPU might overheat, it depends on the phone and the chips inside and also the heat dissipation quality which can range from different thermal pastes to different heatsinks and to where is that heat transfered after that, its a risk of hardware damage without knowing its internal chips temps.
But thats just me who knows maybe im wrong.
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Well that would totally make sense, but at least as to OC+slight OV it has been tested that the possibility of making some actual damage will most likely be very slim untill around the 5 year mark or so of usage. As to DVFS, by disabling that you don't actually disable throttling completely, which is still managed by the kernel (as it should), but only Samsung's more aggressive throttling which is completely unnecessary because it's always trying to keep the phone "super cool" at the expense of performance, while some people who are into heavy games would use a device hot to the point that it causes mild discomfort (but still safe for the components), rather than a device that is slightly cooler but gets laggy after 2 minutes of actual gameplay.
I guess it's up to the user to decide whether to mess with this or not, maybe for most people it won't be worth even the slight risks but for people like me who happen to enjoy heavy games and swap phones every year and a half or so it's good to have the option.
vnvman said:
Well that would totally make sense, but at least as to OC+slight OV it has been tested that the possibility of making some actual damage will most likely be very slim untill around the 5 year mark or so of usage. As to DVFS, by disabling that you don't actually disable throttling completely, which is still managed by the kernel (as it should), but only Samsung's more aggressive throttling which is completely unnecessary because it's always trying to keep the phone "super cool" at the expense of performance, while some people who are into heavy games would use a device hot to the point that it causes mild discomfort (but still safe for the components), rather than a device that is slightly cooler but gets laggy after 2 minutes of actual gameplay.
I guess it's up to the user to decide whether to mess with this or not, maybe for most people it won't be worth even the slight risks but for people like me who happen to enjoy heavy games and swap phones every year and a half or so it's good to have the option.
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I tought the DVFS disabled the throttle completely, its good to know it doesnt then and i agree, the samsung throttle is overreacting and prolly did better good with it off than on, thanks for your suggestion.
TheWarKeeper said:
Yes that would increase performance but its a heavy risk considering you might burn up ur cpu or gpu and void the warranty
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I play with Samsung DVFS always off and I can play dead effect for 2 hours straight without performance degradation... CPU doesn't go over 75-80*C depending on the ambient temperature