

Ask HN: Android GPU - dillon

So, I've been doing a lot of researching on the internet... actually its been two hours so far because I'm a perfectionist, anyways I'm getting a new phone and I was reading a lot about Android phones having GPUs but Android doesn't use it at all. Then I read that you can use the GPU in applications but it's just not used for the UI. Can anyone clarify this? When is the GPU used in Android, if at all. I'm mostly wondering about Android 2.3 and 3.1, since those are the latest versions.
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winkv
that depends on how the hardware vendor has implemented the support for it.
Opengl es is almost always offloaded to a gpu and java bindings for the same
are also available so u can use them in your ui. As far as general android ui
is concerned it is rendered using skia,a graphics library,it can be configured
to use gpu via opengl but most hardware vendors don't do it. so in general
android ui is not rendered using gpu but it depends on hw
implementation.....pardon me for english,its not my native language.

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drivebyacct2
Honeycomb's UI is GPU accelerated. You can benefit from the GPU in
applications, yes.

ICS should bring a high level of hardware acceleration for both UI and
applications to both tablets and phones.

