Episode 100: Android Rendering
Android Developers Backstage
00:00
The Problem With Hardware Rendering
In the original Android releases, up through Gingerbread, Android would render everything immediately through software. That means that the CPU not only had to deal with everything that your view system did, but it also had to slam out a whole bunch of pixels for everything on the screen that had changed since the previous frame. And obviously, this is not ideal because a CPU isn't really well suited to operating on huge amounts of data at once. So in the case of text, you generally will want to rasterize, turn those into bitmaps on the CPU and then upload those to the GPU so that you can reuse those individual pieces of a texture over and over again.
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