A Look At Android's Graphics Rendering Pipeline

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Look At Android's Graphics Rendering Pipeline

For those interested in Android and graphics, here's a look at their graphics rendering pipeline as written by a long-time Android developer...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAyNDE

[plonoma]

- 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...

You could maybe not have two copies of every texture. one in graphic ram and one in regular ram? That would help. I can't help the feeling that there is still a lot of low hanging fruit on the graphics and hardware accelerated rendering front.
And the 8MB is a lot, what about shared libraries for the things that take all the space in?

[Djhg2000]

You could maybe not have two copies of every texture. one in graphic ram and one in regular ram? That would help. I can't help the feeling that there is still a lot of low hanging fruit on the graphics and hardware accelerated rendering front.
And the 8MB is a lot, what about shared libraries for the things that take all the space in?

My thoughts exactly, those 8MB shouldn't have to be loaded over and over.