Question

I have been developing a game basic card game for Android. At the moment I am targeting Android 3.0 and testing on a Asus Transformer tablet. I am using a SurfaceView object with simple canvas operations similar to Lunar Lander example in the SDK. I have hardware acceleration enabled in AndroidManifest.xml.

I am practically finished coding the game. However, I am having some frame rate problems. I am getting a frame rate of 21-22 fps during basic gameplay. However, I have anticipated adding some particle effects for simple eye-candy, which will certainly give me an unacceptable frame rate. To help isolate the problem, I commented out the drawing for all text and cards as well as all animation. This raised my frame rate to 31 fps. This leaves me with a simple game loop which locks the canvas, fills the canvas black, draws a 1280×800 background bitmap, and unlocks and posts the canvas. Removing the background draw increases the frame rate to about 62 fps, which should be around the device maximum due to lockCanvas throttling. Should drawing a simple bitmap be such a costly operation? I know it is a large texture, but I’ve seen many games that successfully use large background textures with little effect. Can I achieve decent frame rates without OpenGL? I’ve watched the log and have confirmed that it is not a GC problem.

The only thing I have tried so far is to make sure the bitmap is not actively re-scaling. I modified my background png to 1280×696 which is the exact size adjusted for the action bar and the main honeycomb bottom bar. I placed the modified in the drawable-nodpi folder, so I believe my image should not be scaling. However, this had no effect on the frame rate; frame rate drops to 31 fps drawing only the background.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to improve the frame rate? I am guessing that my problem must be coming from drawing the bitmap since I have eliminated basically everything else.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem that was caused by using RGB_565 for my SurfaceView and ARGB_8888 for my Bitmap. Once I set the Surface View to use the same as the Bitmap, I went from 20fps to 59-60 fps. The conversion is very slow. Sorry this is late but maybe it will help someone else.