The value of animations

Posted Nov 5, 2010 9:20 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: The value of animations by sladen
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

> The animations (done for free by the GPU) are masking the general setup and teardown of applications running on the main CPU.

I don't think things are quite as simple as you suggest. One, the animations aren't done by the GPU alone, they need support (think loading, preparing, scheduling) from the rest of the system. Two, the GPU draws power to do those animations, which is a cost. And three, perhaps most relevantly, they are not free from a developer time perspective. At least in theory (though this may not apply to software developed by volunteers and/or enthusiasts), that time could have been put into reducing your general setup and teardown time rather than creating animations.

The value of animations

Posted Nov 5, 2010 11:27 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

"I don't think things are quite as simple as you suggest. One, the animations aren't done by the GPU alone, they need support (think loading, preparing, scheduling) from the rest of the system."

Negligible.

"Two, the GPU draws power to do those animations, which is a cost. And three, perhaps most relevantly, they are not free from a developer time perspective."

GPU draws power to draw stuff in any case. And most effects are so simple that from GPU's point of view they are essentially free.

The value of animations

Posted Nov 5, 2010 15:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Yes.

If your interested in speed and battery life then using the GPU to it's full extent will get you both faster then trying to depend on the CPU alone.

Using the CPU to do things that the GPU can do faster just means your wasting cycles and ruining your efficiency and performance.

The GPU is now a part of your computer as much as floating point processing is or DMA. It's not longer possible to treat it like it's some sort of optional add-on or something you only use for games. It's a native part of the architecture and should be possible for application writers to easily take advantage of.

In PCs this has been true for a while and with mobile world this is more and more true. After all you can look at the requirements for Windows Phone 7... they require a DirectX 9 capable GPU.