Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Has Hardware Acceleration
While the folks at Google didn’t make a big deal over this in their announcement and in the platform highlights page, they have indeed added hardware acceleration in Android 4.0. Developers don’t have to do much at all to take advantage – simply make your minSdkVersion or targetSdkVersion values to “14” and your application is automatically taking advantage of the GPU inside.
If you’re not familiar, hardware acceleration employs the GPU to render animations and graphics, meaning your Android experience will be as smooth as on, say, Windows Phone 7 or iOS. It’s something we’ve been waiting on for quite some time and we’re rather excited that it’s finally here. Once you see what hardware acceleration does for the user experience you’ll probably never want to leave Android. [source, via]