Quote: "If the program fits in RAM then it shouldn't be too slow should it? However, if it doesn't fit in RAM because of the doubling usage issue then wouldn't it crash instead of just slowing down? The acceleration could be CPU/GPU expensive and like Mr Valentine I've never heard of the Mali gpu. There could be a bottleneck somewhere but AppGameKit will have multithreading capabilities (for box2d at least) very soon!"
You should bare in mind that a phone dont only have your app in memory but alot of widgets and other functions while you play in the background.
So if the memory usage is doubled with your app so would also the freespace that the background apps use be limited.
You can do a simple experiment by removing 2 gb ram from your computer and see wath happens
Mine at least gets slow and sluggish.
If iam not wrong so does also android try to compensate low memory by creating virtual memory on internal flash or sd card.
But there is also something else that is the problem with sandwich and agk.
Gpu accelerated function on 3.0 and later is the only known fact that i know that slows apps down on android.
And its well known on mobile dev forums.
And is many times recomended to turn of by default in the manifest file there.
Quote: "I have noticed my SGSII become more crash prone ever since the upgrade to 4.0.x
and i can not downgrade to the original now as 4.0.1 has become my factory reset default
unless i have a look at that boot format option list... but I guess I am stuck with a crashing phone... can not wait for Windows8 ablets to come out and darn well hoping BT [British Telecom] stock it when they are out... as my current contract ends around May next year... [currently with O2... and will be glad to leave them when I do ]"
I must say that iam not that big fan of sandwich either that i have on my 10 inch pad,feels slow compared to gingerbread.
Quote: "I'm not sure why having a GPU would double the memory useage, but I couldn't say it doesn't either. I would have thought having a GPU of any kind would speed things up if anything, and a lack of one would slow things down. Moon Snaker is quite big for a mobile app, at 37 MB or so, but it would hardly fill the memory of the device even if you do double it up. My other game Obliterator is currently about 90MB (so far lol), so it would suffer even more if that is actually the case."
You are taking this wrong as your app during play uses alot more memory then that
A 2 mb app in size can use 90 mb of ram,its up to how many sprites and physics calculations it do etc
The main problem i see is that on no tegra devices so is this emulated?
I have a function on my pad that shows the memory usage i belive ?
If i find it and get it to work so could i try some simple agk apps and see the differrence on gingerbread and sandwich.
Edited ..........
I found a good article here !
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/02/sony_ics/
Short bit from it.
and that the support for hardware-accelerated graphics across the board means even things as mundane as the Settings app need a couple of MB more than they used to.
That leads to memory shortages, which in turn forces Android to shut down background activities such as the home screen or dialler to make space. So when a user quits a game there's a delay in restarting those apps, making the system appear slow.
Edited...........
Downloaded and tested moonsnaker and found no performance issues on my sandwich pad?
And its not any better then yours dvader
Its an dmtech pad
The only things are the usuall sprites that have borders at some times and blurry sprites.
It uses a bit more cpu then many other apps but not that terrible at all?
Android 2.3 Gingerbread , ZTE Skate , 480x800 , 800 mhz cpu , Samsung Galaxy Y , 240x320 , 832 mhz cpu
Android 4.0 Sandwich , Dmtech 3g 9738B , 1024x768 , 9.7 inches , cortex A8 1.2 cpu , 1 gb ram.
