So, I've been doing a lot of researching on the internet... actually its been two hours so far because I'm a perfectionist, anyways I'm getting a new phone and I was reading a lot about Android phones having GPUs but Android doesn't use it at all. Then I read that you can use the GPU in applications but it's just not used for the UI. Can anyone clarify this? When is the GPU used in Android, if at all. I'm mostly wondering about Android 2.3 and 3.1, since those are the latest versions.
that depends on how the hardware vendor has implemented the support for it. Opengl es is almost always offloaded to a gpu and java bindings for the same are also available so u can use them in your ui.
As far as general android ui is concerned it is rendered using skia,a graphics library,it can be configured to use gpu via opengl but most hardware vendors don't do it. so in general android ui is not rendered using gpu but it depends on hw implementation.....pardon me for english,its not my native language.
Honeycomb's UI is GPU accelerated. You can benefit from the GPU in applications, yes.<p>ICS should bring a high level of hardware acceleration for both UI and applications to both tablets and phones.