Google introduced a tool Android GPU Inspector, which will facilitate the process of creating and optimizing games for smartphones running Android. The search giant plans to distribute it to developers, giving them the ability to track detailed information about how the game is being processed on a particular device, noticing frame rate drops, power spikes and many other metrics. As a result, this will significantly facilitate the launch and processing of games, even on not the most productive smartphones.
Android games will perform better thanks to improved optimization
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Google developed Android GPU Inspector in collaboration with Qualcomm. Despite this, this tool is planned to be made universal, allowing developers to test and debug games for smartphones regardless of hardware and their manufacturer. However, at the current stage Android GPU Inspector only supports the new Google Pixel 4 and Google Pixel 4 XL, with which it has been shown to work quite efficiently, providing a reduction in resource consumption while maintaining the same performance indicators in some games.
Distribute drivers for graphics Android – smartphones will be available through Google Play
According to Google, the company's specialists in the process of debugging using Android GPU Inspector managed to build an optimization plan for an unnamed game, which allowed to achieve a 40% reduction in the resource consumption of the computing power of the graphics accelerator. That is, in fact, the game could run stably on the device, even if it was almost half the performance. This will open the door for developers to a world of low-cost smartphones, which usually suffer from either FPS or graphics quality. Indeed, after optimization, many more users will become interested in games, which will bring more money to developers.
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Achieving the best results in the optimization process will require proactive action not only from developers who have to adapt games for specific hardware combinations, but also from smartphone manufacturers. The fact is that Android GPU Inspector will be able to detect flaws in the firmware of graphics chips that can only be recognized during testing with a specific game, and then vendors will have to somehow fix the situation. To do this, Google has developed the ability to distribute graphics drivers through Google Play in order to ensure maximum coverage, including those smartphones that are no longer supported.
Expansion of the range of devices supported by the GPU Inspector tool Android is planned to begin very soon. The first in line are the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Note 10. It is not very clear whether I mean the entire line or only two specific models, but since they have identical hardware, if you do not take into account different amounts of RAM, which in this case is not so important , then, most likely, all devices of each model line will be supported. Quite oddly enough, Google chose last year's smartphones over the newest. But this can be explained by the fact that the development of Android GPU Inspector has been going on for a long time, and the search giant chose the S10 and Note 10, since the S20 had not yet been released at that time.
Optimization is a real problem Android. Despite the high-performance hardware, it seems that most games for this OS are made literally on the knee. Take Fortnite, for example. If in the version for iOS this game supports 60 FPS mode on all flagship smartphones starting from 2018, then on Android such devices can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Moreover, some of them are far from new. It's just that their manufacturers jumped in and agreed with Epic Games for an exclusive optimization. However, now, thanks to the appearance of Android GPU Inspector, it is most likely not necessary to negotiate specifically, and this cannot but rejoice.