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Some incredible conjecture here. Assuming that Android is caught with its pants down and will desperately try to "catch up" with Apple (the other scenario is th

Some incredible conjecture here. Assuming that Android is caught with its pants down and will desperately try to "catch up" with Apple (the other scenario is that Android has diverged dramatically, and if anything this is Apple catching up with Android, but I hardly expect someone like Marco to ever spin it that way), the notion that the new UI rudiments on iOS 7 are intense on GPUs -- and thus out of the capabilities of lower-end devices -- is incredibly presumptive. I haven't installed the beta of iOS 7 on any of my devices to pull the metrics, but it looks incredibly mild on the GPU (effects like layered blurring or transluency are an absolute laugh for any modern GPU, even on very low-end devices). This does not look demanding on the shader or fill rate whatsoever, which of course Apple would avoid because the GPU can be very expensive on the battery, and can monopolize the memory bus. This is all quite funny regardless. Samsung had parallax and accelerometer (later gyroscope) based interfaces for years in their TouchWiz shizzle, just as Google heavily pushed 3D interfaces (see RenderScript). I would never argue that it is identical to what Apple has introduced, but once against from the zeitgeist of Apple fanatics you would believe this is the next step brought to us from Apple.

rimantas 13y ago
> effects like layered blurring or transluency are an > absolute laugh for any modern GPU, even on very low-end > devices Yet for some reason some simple scrolling still has problems on anything but top Android devices. Now combine scrolling with that oh-so-easy translucency and blurring.
- corresation 13y ago
  The issues with scrolling on Android is not and has never been a GPU issue -- you can't solve it putting a more powerful GPU in place. Instead it's a UI-thread issue and composition hindrances like stop-the-world garbage collection (or synchronous load-on-demand UI rudiments that halt or significantly impede UI interactions). If it were a simple GPU issue we would have quickly moved past it (GPUs now are dramatically more powerful than a few short years ago), but alas, it is not.
- smackfu 13y ago
  Yeah, scrolling is easy if the entire bitmap you are scrolling exists in memory already. Then it's just a GPU thing, like the stuff in iOS 7. Scrolling is a lot harder when the content that is being scrolled to is being rendered in realtime, and when the scroll buffer is endless. Then it's not the GPU that is the problem, but the threading interaction.
angersock 13y ago
Now now, don't let history get in the way of a good narrative.
roc 13y ago
Yet how long after the hardware was absolutely capable of matching iOS for responsiveness in the current UI, did it take for Android to prioritize and achieve that goal and how long did it then take manufacturers to update their implementations? And to what extent has it filtered down to the bulk of cheap devices? I don't think the (sane) argument is that Android can't match. Or that the hardware to match is unavailable/expensive. I think there's a valid point about Android having different priorities that often see it ignoring this area and the manufacturers of cheap devices generally just not caring to try. [1] So inasmuch as iOS6-class performance was in reach of even the 'don't really care' class of Android manufacturers, iOS7 does present a higher bar (that they are likely to continue not really caring about), meaning tens-to-hundreds of millions of devices that don't (regardless of whether they could) match on visuals. Until the inexorable march of performance-per-watt brings them brute force solutions. [1] Is Google even going to think it's worth the resources to chase blur effects at the expense of other features? And if they don't, would Samsung? And as the maker of its own 'cheaper' devices, would Samsung filter that higher-end look to its cheaper devices out of the gate? Or retain it as a differentiator to push people into buying new Galaxy kit, instead of the lower-end devices?
- corresation 13y ago
  Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front, owing to some fundamental architectural choices made early in Android's development (chief being the overuse of managed code, and the costs that come with it). This is entirely a software problem, having little to do with hardware, yet the article makes a hardware argument that is simply not supported. It's also worth giving some perspective on those rampant "cheap" devices: The most common Android handset in use in the US of A is the Galaxy S3. Other very powerful devices fill the top echelon of deployments. Any notion that assumes that it's legions of bottom tier devices just isn't accurate. And the great thing about GPU shaders is that they're eminently scalable. Again, assuming that this notion that Android will chase iOS is true, these things are the most easily toggled, and having better effects on top tier devices that scale back on lower devices is trivial. All of this (the submission I mean, and related articles) is just conjecture. Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system. Framing everything in an Android context is just speculation.

rimantas 13y ago

> effects like layered blurring or transluency are an > absolute laugh for any modern GPU, even on very low-end > devices Yet for some reason some simple scrolling still has problems on anything but top Android devices. Now combine scrolling with that oh-so-easy translucency and blurring.

corresation 13y ago
The issues with scrolling on Android is not and has never been a GPU issue -- you can't solve it putting a more powerful GPU in place. Instead it's a UI-thread issue and composition hindrances like stop-the-world garbage collection (or synchronous load-on-demand UI rudiments that halt or significantly impede UI interactions). If it were a simple GPU issue we would have quickly moved past it (GPUs now are dramatically more powerful than a few short years ago), but alas, it is not.
smackfu 13y ago
Yeah, scrolling is easy if the entire bitmap you are scrolling exists in memory already. Then it's just a GPU thing, like the stuff in iOS 7. Scrolling is a lot harder when the content that is being scrolled to is being rendered in realtime, and when the scroll buffer is endless. Then it's not the GPU that is the problem, but the threading interaction.

angersock 13y ago

Now now, don't let history get in the way of a good narrative.

roc 13y ago

Yet how long after the hardware was absolutely capable of matching iOS for responsiveness in the current UI, did it take for Android to prioritize and achieve that goal and how long did it then take manufacturers to update their implementations? And to what extent has it filtered down to the bulk of cheap devices? I don't think the (sane) argument is that Android can't match. Or that the hardware to match is unavailable/expensive. I think there's a valid point about Android having different priorities that often see it ignoring this area and the manufacturers of cheap devices generally just not caring to try. [1] So inasmuch as iOS6-class performance was in reach of even the 'don't really care' class of Android manufacturers, iOS7 does present a higher bar (that they are likely to continue not really caring about), meaning tens-to-hundreds of millions of devices that don't (regardless of whether they could) match on visuals. Until the inexorable march of performance-per-watt brings them brute force solutions. [1] Is Google even going to think it's worth the resources to chase blur effects at the expense of other features? And if they don't, would Samsung? And as the maker of its own 'cheaper' devices, would Samsung filter that higher-end look to its cheaper devices out of the gate? Or retain it as a differentiator to push people into buying new Galaxy kit, instead of the lower-end devices?

corresation 13y ago
Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front, owing to some fundamental architectural choices made early in Android's development (chief being the overuse of managed code, and the costs that come with it). This is entirely a software problem, having little to do with hardware, yet the article makes a hardware argument that is simply not supported. It's also worth giving some perspective on those rampant "cheap" devices: The most common Android handset in use in the US of A is the Galaxy S3. Other very powerful devices fill the top echelon of deployments. Any notion that assumes that it's legions of bottom tier devices just isn't accurate. And the great thing about GPU shaders is that they're eminently scalable. Again, assuming that this notion that Android will chase iOS is true, these things are the most easily toggled, and having better effects on top tier devices that scale back on lower devices is trivial. All of this (the submission I mean, and related articles) is just conjecture. Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system. Framing everything in an Android context is just speculation.