Android 3.0 Hardware Acceleration

One of the biggest changes we made to Android in this release is the addition of a new rendering pipeline so that applications can benefit from hardware accelerated 2D graphics. Hardware accelerated graphics is nothing new to the Android platform, it has always been used for windows composition or OpenGL games for instance, but with this new rendering pipeline applications can benefit from an extra boost in performance. On a Motorola Xoom device, all the standard applications like Browser and Calendar use hardware-accelerated 2D graphics.

In this article, I will show you how to enable the hardware accelerated 2D graphics pipeline in your application and give you a few tips on how to use it properly.

Go faster

To enable the hardware accelerated 2D graphics, open your AndroidManifest.xml file and add the following attribute to the <application /> tag:

    android:hardwareAccelerated="true"

If your application uses only standard widgets and drawables, this should be all you need to do. Once hardware acceleration is enabled, all drawing operations performed on a View's Canvas are performed using the GPU.

If you have custom drawing code you might need to do a bit more, which is in part why hardware acceleration is not enabled by default. And it's why you might want to read the rest of this article, to understand some of the important details of acceleration.

Controlling hardware acceleration

Because of the characteristics of the new rendering pipeline, you might run into issues with your application. Problems usually manifest themselves as invisible elements, exceptions or different-looking pixels. To help you, Android gives you 4 different ways to control hardware acceleration. You can enable or disable it on the following elements:

• Application
• Activity
• Window
• View

Read more: Android Developers

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