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>> turning instead to software to handle functions that had historically been done in hardware >That generally means doing things less efficiently. Devices wil
by swiley 5y ago
>> turning instead to software to handle functions that had historically been done in hardware
>That generally means doing things less efficiently. Devices will get slower and battery lifetimes shorter.
I'm personally not at all convinced hardware accelerated GUI toolkits are more power efficient than software rendered ones. Weather it's due to the abstraction or some weird idea that drawing is now "free" you end up with way more drawing being done once something is hardware accelerated and it tends to more than offset the efficiency gains. The only place it really works are video games because they're actually paying attention to where the limits are. (and they don't really care about power efficiency.)
- giantrobot 5y ago> I'm personally not at all convinced hardware accelerated GUI toolkits are more power efficient than software rendered ones. It really depends on what is being drawn and how. If a GUI toolkit is all flat colors, basic shapes, and doesn't use antialiasing then it can be very power efficient on modern CPUs, even low power embedded ones. If it instead uses gradients, alpha blending, antialiasing, and drawing complex shapes it's going to far less efficient all in software. The difficulty increases with increased demands for fill rate (display size x frame rate). On modern CPUs (even embedded ones) a software rendering to a QVGA display would be no probably and likely no less efficient than hardware acceleration. However as the fill rate demand and drawing complexity increases software rendering will quickly hit a wall.