Question

I cannot understand if it’s a bug of the emulator or what else

Some days ago I updated my Galaxy S from Froyo (2.2.3, I think) to Gingerbread 2.3.4. I was pleased about the improved performances, in particular I noticed the game that I’m developing. While before I had around 30 FPS, with the Gingerbread the FPS was around 45.

So I had a (Bad) idea: Maybe Google guys fixed also the non-excellent performances of the emulator! (I never updated my SDK and related softwares since I Intalled it, it was the r7)

I started my SDK Manager and I started the update to r12. The Manager installed everything, I started Eclipse, then my game on a HVGA 320×480 emulator as usually, and suprise. Only 10 FPS, where just some hours before I had 25-30.

The Android OS on the emulator seems to react like before, And I’ve noticed That sometimes, when just lanched the game for the first time with the emulator just booted (not from snapshot) the game runs for 1-2 seconds at 25-30, Then drops immediately to 10

So I tried the following:

• updating the ADT Plugin for eclipse
• reinstalling the SDK r12 with the official installer (in another location)
• tried a lot of different Adroid OS targets
• running the virtual machine directly from the SDK Manager with Eclipse closed
• speeding up my Win7 by stopping all not necessary services, processes and Antivirus
• starting the HVGA emulator with the flag “Scale display to real size” (damn, the screen is really small)
• Googled a lot

Nothing helped me, everytime the framerate was 10 FPS! It’s like the emulator runs a frame limiter on 2d graphics. And on the real phone works great.

Is not a problem related to PC hardware specs, because my pc isn’t so bad (dual core E8400 3.0 Ghz, 4GB RAM, Ati radeon 4870 1GB, Win7x64)

Then finally I tried the WVGA 480×800 emulator. And another surprise: 13 fps!

I spent a lot of hours to try to fix this problem, whitout success. And I have not so much time for my game project, so I wonder if:

• Is it a “known issue” this decrease of performances though the sdk releases, and should I only do testing on my phone, waiting patiently that Google fix the emulator?

• Is it possible to get and reinstall the old versions of sdk/emulator (If I could choose, I would back my r7). I need to test my application on different screen sizes, and so the emulator is not usable.

Answer 1

SOLVED: I found that adding the options:

-no-boot-anim -qemu -icount auto

to the emulator solved the problem!
(eclipse: Run->Run Configurations.. then tab “Target”, textBox “Additional Emulator Command Line Options” )