Android2D's performance is low

[codeanticode]

A full-screen app on a N5X with fairly simple graphics runs at ~3fps, while P2D gives 60fps

[benfry]

What happened? Even the original G1 was never that bad.

[codeanticode]

Apart from the modifications in the core library's architecture (PSurface, etc) nothing changed in PGraphicsAndroid2D, and the new architecture should not affect how the renderer handles the canvas. But I may be missing something, so will be looking into it.

[victordiaz]

I experienced the same.
The screen the resolution in newer phones are way higher than old ones, and people tend to play with full resolution so each redraw is just too much for hires phones. Just compare the newer Pixel phone 1,440x2,560 vs the first HTC Magic / G1 480x320

Would it make sense to add a scaling factor in the Android version? using a downsized canvas and upscale it when drawing.

[codeanticode]

@victordiaz Looks like the problem is that the offscreen canvas that PGraphicsAndroid2D uses for drawing is not hardware accelerated, see this stackoverflow thread where one of the Android software engineers confirms that is was still the case for 4.2.1. I tested on devices with Android 5 and 7, and canvas is not hardware accelerated yet.

According to Google's documentation, "Android 2D rendering pipeline supports hardware acceleration, meaning that all drawing operations that are performed on a View's canvas use the GPU" and that "Hardware acceleration is enabled by default if Target API level is >=14", but this seems to apply only if one uses the Canvas object provided in the View.onDraw(Canvas) callback (see this and this). Even in that case, using a hardware-accelerated canvas could be problematic, as not all drawing functions are supported in older API levels.

Of course, you can always use the OpenGL renderers (P2D/P3D), which are fully hardware-accelerated and should be reasonable close to the default renderer in quality (specially if using smooth()).

In principle, it would be possible to implement your idea of drawing to a downsized canvas and upscaling when rendering it to the screen... in fact, part of the scaling logic is already there (at least to keep compatibility with the Java mode), but we will need to add some new API to run the sketch in fullscreen mode with a downscaled canvas resolution, which I'm not sure it is worth the effort.

[victordiaz]

@codeanticode Yes, you are right about the lack of hardware acceleration in many methods of the Android Canvas.
On the other hand I would consider having a scaling mode, not only for the canvas mode, but for the opengl mode. I've tried many lowcost / old devices where Processing doesnt run smoothly, specially tablets. (higres screen and not performant gpu).

One little trick I've been using was scaling the drawing View using android methods (view.setScaleX/Y). Easy to implement although it might have some drawbacks depending on how Processing for Android is implemented.

[loooog]

Extremely low ,too slow .any way to compile to. Ndk or CPP stuff

[codeanticode]

We are looking into this, considering this contribution for faster P2D on desktop as a possibility.

[codeanticode]

Testing the new P2X renderer in this branch. Need to integrate it better with the existing code, but is looking good. Version 4.1 will be an exciting release of the mode!