ICS Hardware Acceleration = Honeycomb's?

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I thought it worth opening a discussion on the recent Google engineer's Google+ post on how ICS handles hardware acceleration vs. Honeycomb. That is to say, it doesn't offer "more" hardware acceleration at all.

https://plus.google.com/105051985738...ts/2FXDCz8x93s

Not to say that ICS won't be more highly optimized nor that it might not have better multi-core support (I have no idea if it does or doesn't), but it's not going to offer magically better hardware acceleration than Honeycomb.

Thoughts?

That was an interesting read when I saw it earlier, yes. I can't really say what the consequences of it are, as I haven't used Honeycomb. At least we can take from it that, as Tegra 3 has the most powerful GPU on any Android device, it has the most potential to be the smoothest in operation?

Originally Posted by Mithent

That was an interesting read when I saw it earlier, yes. I can't really say what the consequences of it are, as I haven't used Honeycomb. At least we can take from it that, as Tegra 3 has the most powerful GPU on any Android device, it has the most potential to be the smoothest in operation?

Unlikely.

When it comes to hardware acceleration and multi-core support, then Android 4.0 is pretty much the same as Honeycomb. My only hope is that the UI of Android 4.0 is better, as it is not very laggy on my Galaxy Nexus.

Multi-core will play more role when there are a lot of parallel tasks, it might affect some games, but overall, while it will be the best Android tablet yet, it won't be the best tablet ever. For that we still have to wait at least a year or more.

so they're saying it's just their piss poor optimization for ANYTHING that makes dual core devices with 1GB of ram run like crap on their OS.

dissapointing.

Originally Posted by kristovaher

Unlikely.

When it comes to hardware acceleration and multi-core support, then Android 4.0 is pretty much the same as Honeycomb. My only hope is that the UI of Android 4.0 is better, as it is not very laggy on my Galaxy Nexus.

Multi-core will play more role when there are a lot of parallel tasks, it might affect some games, but overall, while it will be the best Android tablet yet, it won't be the best tablet ever. For that we still have to wait at least a year or more.

It's...a paradox!

Optimization is the name of the game. ICS will help the Tegra 2 tabs, but i suspect it will have an even greater impact on the prime.

Originally Posted by kristovaher

When it comes to hardware acceleration and multi-core support, then Android 4.0 is pretty much the same as Honeycomb.

Indeed. I was really referring to this in the linked article:

As device screen resolution goes up, achieving a 60fps UI is closely related to GPU speed and especially the GPU’s memory bus bandwidth.

I think the reality is ...

Google screwed the pooch when it came to having non-native apps (aka framework based) be accelerated *efficiently* in pre-3.0 days. Some operations did go to the GPU then, but the fact was some sub-view getting invalidated caused much more rendering than was needed.

In 3.x they added an option to have apps say "please accelerate me", but that option is an "opt-in". That choice was done for back-compatibility (not *every* operation in the framework is allowed to be accelerated which means some apps could break).

In reality, most of the "OS" level apps did an opt-in, but not everything. I also doubt general "market" apps do the opt-in (unless they are 3.x+ only).

In 4.x, it's going to be an "opt-out" strategy. So, if an app is broken in ICS, then the developer needs to update/fix their code (IFF necessary, since most are likely to "just work").

Originally Posted by kristovaher

Unlikely.

When it comes to hardware acceleration and multi-core support, then Android 4.0 is pretty much the same as Honeycomb. My only hope is that the UI of Android 4.0 is better, as it is not very laggy on my Galaxy Nexus.

Multi-core will play more role when there are a lot of parallel tasks, it might affect some games, but overall, while it will be the best Android tablet yet, it won't be the best tablet ever. For that we still have to wait at least a year or more.

From what I understand, Honeycomb offers dual-core support. ICS offers greater support than only dual-core.

While that whole read was a little bit disappointing, I am still convinced that ICS overall has been cleaned up compared to Honeycomb/Gingerbread and will make better use of the exceptional hardware of Android devices. The Verge gave ICS an absolutely glowing review in their review of the Galaxy Nexus (they notably said that it was the single greatest leap in the Android OS), and for my particular phone (HTC Sensation), the people who have tried a pre-alpha build of ICS have said that it's already a good deal smoother than Gingerbread ROMs, and of course they aren't even using fully fleshed out builds of ICS.

Whether or not ICS offers things a lot of people have been talking about like greater hardware acceleration, I don't care. As long as it's smoother and can finally hold up a torch to the speed of iOS, that's all that matters. I couldn't care less about the means to achieve that.

I think the biggest gain tye dev community (and in turn the userbase) is going to get from ics is that they will finally release source for a tablet branch of android.

Originally Posted by The Janitor Mop

the people who have tried a pre-alpha build of ICS have said that it's already a good deal smoother than Gingerbread ROMs, and of course they aren't even using fully fleshed out builds of ICS.

I've no doubt that ICS significantly improves on Gingerbread on phones. The question is, how significant will the improvement be from Honeycomb on tablets?

Not saying either way, just moving the discussion along.