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The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

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Re: The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

#41

Post by ZeroGravitas »

pkulak wrote: post #14
jrockway wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is, nobody actually cares about this. I have used an Android phone since the beginning. Touch responsiveness is not something I have ever noticed. Any delay in rendering web pages is due to the network. I think people that write articles about touch responsiveness or animation latency are suffering from the "benchmarking hello world" problem. Yeah, you could speed that stuff up. But 99% of the time, the…

People care, they just don't know what to call it. People who use iPhones try out an Android device and say things like "it's just not as polished", or just notice that it doesn't feel right. That "not feeling right" is because when you scroll on an iPhone it really feels like there's a piece of paper under the screen that your physically moving around with the tip of you finger. With Android it just feels like your…

I'd suggest "not feeling right" has more to do with experience with a different platform, just as random decisions about mouse acceleration or font hinting or what side of the window to put close buttons can completely befuddle switchers.

You specifically state "People who use iPhones" and many others seem to think that the problem is only apparent if you compare it side-by-side. Which suggests to me that it's a fairly marginal concern, particularly compared with other Android flaws that the same people could be working on.

I switched from iPhone (to one of the lowest-end Android phones on the market) and didn't notice this particular issue. I did have general confusion at where things were and how to do things, but by the same token two weeks later my iPhone felt like it was missing a back button.

With subtle effects like this it's easy to sound like audiophiles talking about mp3 encoding. I'd suggest that if you're expecting the hoi polloi to pick up on these subtleties (which may well be imagined or exagerrated in some cases) and carry this fight for you then, like the audiophiles, you're going to be disappointed.

Re: The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

#42

Post by bonch »

jrockway wrote: post #18
potatolicious wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used vanilla Froyo on the Nexus One. It's dog slow. I don't think this problem is isolated to OEM-specific Android modifications (though they certainly don't help). Responsiveness and framerate-wise, even a simple cursory examination will tell you: WP7 and iOS run laps around poor old Android. I got to play with a Nexus S recently, and the responsiveness is greatly improved over Froyo on N1... but is still notic…

I turn animations off. Useless eye candy that just wastes the battery. Also, is it really fair to compare the N1, a phone that's over a year old, to brand-new WP7 phones?

Well, no wonder you "don't notice touch responsiveness."

Re: The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

#44

Post by roadnottaken »

pohl wrote: post #34
jrockway wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is, nobody actually cares about this. I have used an Android phone since the beginning. Touch responsiveness is not something I have ever noticed. Any delay in rendering web pages is due to the network. I think people that write articles about touch responsiveness or animation latency are suffering from the "benchmarking hello world" problem. Yeah, you could speed that stuff up. But 99% of the time, the…

DF regarding this thread: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/04/hacker-news-ying

This is getting circular... let's not keep this up.

Re: The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

#45

Post by simonh »

Purely by chance, I was trying out a galaxy tab at a store today. I loaded up the Financial Times web site, which took an age because the store wifi was crap and tried scrolling the web page and it stuttered quite a bit at first then smoothed up, zooming as juddery as well. Did the same thing on an ipad - slow loading about the same, but the instant the page was rendered it scrolled and zoomed perfectly.

Also the widget for editing the web page URL on the Tab was a horrible usability car crash. What's up with that? Disclosure - iPhone user, but Android curious.

Re: The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

#47

Post by nikdudnik »

jrockway wrote: post #11
wccrawford wrote: post #2

This isn't the first thing I've seen that Google devs really just didn't get. I think it's from the rapid expansion that Google has done. They get people working on things that aren't really their area of expertise because they wanted to try something in their 20% time. In this case, it's obvious that we've got server people working on mobile code. Future hardware will resolve these inefficiencies? UGH. That's defini…

But the thing is, nobody actually cares about this. I have used an Android phone since the beginning. Touch responsiveness is not something I have ever noticed. Any delay in rendering web pages is due to the network. I think people that write articles about touch responsiveness or animation latency are suffering from the "benchmarking hello world" problem. Yeah, you could speed that stuff up. But 99% of the time, the…

The first thing I've noticed about Android was the overall slugishness of UI animation. And the guy who was showing it to me was amazed by the smoothness of my iPhone 3G UI. BUT YES OF COURSE NOBODY CARES.

Re: The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

#48

Post by mikeklaas »

danudey wrote: post #27
pkulak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People care, they just don't know what to call it. People who use iPhones try out an Android device and say things like "it's just not as polished", or just notice that it doesn't feel right. That "not feeling right" is because when you scroll on an iPhone it really feels like there's a piece of paper under the screen that your physically moving around with the tip of you finger. With Android it just feels like your…

Twelve years ago or so, I was reformatting my home desktop (then a Linux machine) and I decided to try to change things up a little, so I installed FreeBSD to try it out. I figured that there wouldn't be any superficial differences, but I knew that there were architectural ones that I'd run into eventually and maybe I could learn a little more about how different OSes worked. One thing I did notice right away was tha…

Wow, I totally had the same experience with FreeBSD about 15 years ago. I have no idea if it persists on modern hardware, though.

Does anyone have a good explanation for this?

Re: The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

#49

Post by panacea »

nikdudnik wrote: post #47
jrockway wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is, nobody actually cares about this. I have used an Android phone since the beginning. Touch responsiveness is not something I have ever noticed. Any delay in rendering web pages is due to the network. I think people that write articles about touch responsiveness or animation latency are suffering from the "benchmarking hello world" problem. Yeah, you could speed that stuff up. But 99% of the time, the…

The first thing I've noticed about Android was the overall slugishness of UI animation. And the guy who was showing it to me was amazed by the smoothness of my iPhone 3G UI. BUT YES OF COURSE NOBODY CARES.

If you actually look really closely, a lot of what iOS does with animations are about giving the illusion of responsiveness and smoothness.

I'm not saying things aren't incredibly responsive, but some of the animation techniques are used brilliantly to disguise lag.

Three examples:

1. Mobile Safari doesn't wait to render what it hasn't downloaded/formated before responding to touch gestures. You swipe and the page scrolls. It might display a checkerboard before it catches up with rendering, but the swipe command takes precendent.

2. Those wizzy transitions when double-tapping the home screen, or returning to the spring-board. They start immediately and actually mask what's going on behind the scenes with regard to processing a request. They're the ultimate illusionist progress-bar. And they need to be tuned finely to present the illusion or else it becomes obvious that they're masking tactics.

When people complain about the performance of new iOS versions on older devices such as the 3G, what they're really noticing is the illusion has been broken as Apple is optimising and fine-tuning the illusions for the latest hardware.

3. Those screengrabbed snapshots of apps that have been completely closed and display when an app is restarted. If the load time is short enough, the illusion of instantly re-entering an app is maintained, even if all you're seeing is a stale image of the app your closed earlier.

I'm not sure if Android employ any of these tricks, but they demonstrate the focus and undocumented nature of Apple's drive to create the illusion of perceived GUI 'smoothness'.

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