You already know that with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean they have declared a war against lagginess and the outcome is pretty impressive. Frame rate of the UI transition has increased in 60 FPS with VSync with Triple Buffering. This is more valuable than feature improvement, for long term survival of Android among competitors.
Below video is recorded with RED camera with 300 FPS to show you the difference between UI transition in ICS and JB.
Quick Catch-up
- Story of Project Butter in Android Jelly Bean
Android Jelly Bean official update is not yet released and probably it will take couple of weeks or months. If you have manufacture themed version of Android it will take even longer. This would depend on your carrier as well.
In the meantime here is a quick tip for you to improve graphical performance in your Android ICS handset till JB comes out officially. However this will apply only for applications, not for home screen and other core OS functions.
Enable Force GPU Rendering
- Go to Settings -> Developer Options
- There you can see geeky options for android developer
- Check Force GPU rendering
Leave settings, try to open few applications and see whether there is any difference. For some applications you will notice some improvement in UI and transitions. If you feel like things got worse after enabling this, simply uncheck the option.
What is Force GPU Rendering?
GPU stand for Graphic Processing Unit which is a separate processing unit. The objective here is let the CPU to do general OS related processing while GPU is doing specific graphic related processing. If you are an Android developer you know that Software development Kit (SDK) is letting you to specify whether your app should use GPU if available.
Force GPU rendering is always using GPU to render application graphics regardless of above mention developer options. Even if developer disable GPU rendering for a specific app, still it will use it if you have enable Force GPU rendering and freed CPU to do other important work.
I know most of the general user never even touch developer options, but this is something worth trying.
Tags: #Android #Ice Cream Sandwich