In the last few decades, the world of 3D-games, animation, and rendering have thrived mostly, the Force GPU Rendering has played a significant role in it.
As the industries of 3D-designing, animation, and rendering are becoming cost-effective day by day software developers are trying to fill the accessibility gap instantly by developing computer graphics software like Blender, 3Dsmax, Houdini, Cinema 4D, Maya, etc. All of this software is performing similar tasks in one or the other ways yielding exceptionally different results.
So, let’s see how Force GPU Rendering helps developers in achieving extraordinarily different outputs from these computer graphics software.
But before we get to the bottom of how and when to enable the option of Force GPU Rendering on your Android devices, let’s first figure out what GPU Rendering is, how it works, what is its role in Rendering, and so on.
What Is GPU Rendering And How It Works?
GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit or people generally call it as Graphics Card, is a device having a set of specific hardware capabilities that are meant to map well with the way in which various 3D engines execute their code, including geometry setup and execution, texture mapping, memory access, and shaders. The ways in which 3D engines function and the GPU designers build their hardware are related in some or the other way.
Few of you may remember that AMD’s HD 5000 family used a VLIW5 architecture, while certain high-end GPUs in the HD 6000 family used a VLIW4 architecture. AMD changed its approach to parallelism with GCN in the name of extracting a more useful performance per clock cycle.
At its core, GPU is very similar to CPU, but instead of performing calculations and doing tasks related to the operating system and hardware, GPU handles work related to graphics means it puts the things to view on the screen.
GPU Rendering is a process in which the Graphics Processing Unit is used to generate two-dimensional or three-dimensional images from a model by means of computer programs automatically. Also, it is a process of transforming the high-dimensional information into low-dimensional information, for example changing 3D-scenes into 2D-images.
The CPU can also handle the graphical instructions properly but it may drag its attention from some other important stuff for the system due to which may lead to lag as it takes time to process those graphical instructions.
Due to this GPU Rendering comes in action so that the CPU gets enough time to do the stuff that is really critical to the operating system in order to maintain the speed and processing of other instructions present in it.
How does GPU Rendering work?
GPU takes the graphical instructions from the CPU and processes them to produce far much better results as compared to that the CPU produces because GPUs are specially designed for processing graphics related to 3D-gaming, animation, and rendering industries.
It takes the single set of instructions and executes them on multiple cores on multiple data to maintain parallel processing on a single process.
Taking away graphical instructions from the CPU also allows it to concentrate more on other operating system processes thus resulting in better performance of the system as a whole.
How GPU Rendering Is Different From CPU Rendering?
The fundamental way of executing any software program in a computer system is similar in one or the other way whether it has been processed by CPU or GPU. However, CPU is excellent in handling multiple threads simultaneously, but the GPU is remarkably faster as compared to CPU in handling some specific tasks related to graphics.
So, let’s see some of the points on the comparison of CPU and GPU Rendering.
|Since the CPUs are designed to handle a wide range of tasks, but unable to handle the multiple tasks concurrently. And also the end result of processing graphics-related tasks may not be as efficient as the one that can be produced by GPUs.||Since the GPUs are designed specifically for rendering high-resolution images and video concurrently, the output produced by Force GPU Rendering would be much better as compared to the one produced by CPU rendering.|
|As the CPUs are best suited for single-threaded code, so the codes of modern games become too heavy for CPU rendering and to produce the best out of it.||As the GPUs are designed especially for running multiple tasks in parallel on multiple data, so the modern games codes can be handled with ease by the GPU rendering, and also it can generate the output more quickly as compared to CPU rendering.|
|As most of the developers are more familiar with CPU programming so developing codes for rendering via CPU could be easier most of the time as compared to rendering codes via GPU.||Since most of the developers aren’t much familiar with GPU programming and its architectures, that’s why sometimes GPU may face issues while rendering complex scenes due to interactivity issues, or when the system is using the same graphics card for both rendering and display or due to insufficient memory.|
|Rendering via CPU takes more power as compared to GPU because CPUs are power inefficient, spending high amounts of power to deliver low latency results.||While the force GPU rendering consumes less power as compared to CPUs and also produces the results quickly.|
|Since the CPU can access hard drives and primary memory directly, it can hold a greater amount of data as system memory, which is expandable as well as cost-effective.||Since the GPU doesn’t have direct access to hard drives and main memory so it requires CPU to communicate with them. And also when the same graphics card is used for both rendering and displaying complex scenes, they run out of memory as the memory allocated to the Graphics Processing Unit is limited and cannot be expanded as and when required.|
|As the architecture and designs of CPU evolve more frequently so every time a new motherboard is required to upgrade them which can be expensive.||Since GPUs depend on driver updates to ensure compatibility with new hardware, so no new graphics cards are required unless and until the existing graphics card stops supporting the latest updates of graphics card drivers. And due to the increase in computation power hardware costs also become less.|
|However, the classic CPU rendering takes more time in processing graphical instructions but can produce excellent images with higher quality which might be beneficial for the architectural industry.||GPU rendering designed to manage complicated graphics-intensive processes can generate scenes that are beneficial more for the VFX (Visual Effects) industry.|
What Is a GPU Renderer?
GPU Renderer is a program that is designed based on such disciplines as light physics, mathematics, and visual perception is based on.
GPU Renderer is also referred to as the GPU render engine or a GPU-accelerated renderer.
As the use of GPU Rendering is increasing day by day, the variety of GPU Renderers available in the market are also extending. Now there are some such GPU Renderers available in the market, that provide CPU-based Rendering solutions as well as GPU Rendering solutions and also have the ability to switch between them with just a single click.
Some of the frequently used GPU Renderer available in the market are Arnold (Autodesk), Arion (Random Control), FurryBall (Art And Animation Studio), Redshift (Redshift Rendering Technologies), Iray (NVIDIA), Octane (Otoy), and V-Ray RT (Chaos Group).
When To Use Force GPU Rendering Option?
When you are enabling the option Force GPU Rendering on your Android devices you’re just offloading the window components such as buttons, text, 2D graphics calculations to the GPU, thus freeing the CPU to do some other important stuff required for the operating system software.
Enabling the Force GPU Rendering option on your Android device will make you feel less laggy while using any 2D application and also make your device UI animation rendering better than before.
After enabling the force GPU Rendering on your device you will obviously attain a glossy UI experience and better frame rate while using 2D applications, but your device may end-up using more battery than before.
It is obvious that your device would use more battery as compared to that used before, because now both CPU, as well as GPU, is using battery’s power.
After enabling Force GPU rendering, you will see a 10-15% reduction in the battery life of your device because GPUs are known to use more power as compared to CPUs.
As of now, you know the effect of enabling force GPU Rendering on your device, so enabling it on devices with weaker CPU will be fruitful. I would recommend you to leave the Force GPU Rendering option enabled all the time, if your device has an OS less than quad-core.
But remember one thing that the Force GPU Rendering is effective only on the 2D application, not with 3D the graphics application. The one thing that is good with most Android versions is that they won’t interface with 3D applications and will only Force GPU Rendering on 2D applications that don’t use it by default.
So taking all the facts into consideration, you have to decide whether to enable force GPU Rendering or not at the cost of reducing your battery life, on your Android devices. With this in mind, let’s move towards the steps needed to enable Force GPU Rendering on your Android device.
How To Enable Force GPU Rendering On Your Android Device?
As we now know what GPU Rendering is, what are the effects of enabling it, and when to enable it on your Android device, so now the time is to know the steps you need to follow in order to enable it on your device.
The steps required to enable Force GPU Rendering on an Android device are:
- Open the Settings app on your Android device and scroll all the way down to the bottom.
- If you will see the Developer option in the list then skip the steps 3 to 5, otherwise follow the sequence.
- If you don’t get the Developer menu then search for About Phone (About Device), click on it, and then search for the entry called Build Number in its list.
- After getting the Build Number option, tap on it 7 times or more until you get the message saying “You are now a developer“.
- After getting the message, go back to the Settings menu, scroll down and you will be able to see a new menu called Developer options in the list. Click on it.
- Inside that Developer options menu, scroll down to the Hardware Accelerated Rendering and turn the toggle button ON next to Force GPU Rendering.
That’s it. Now the Force GPU Rendering option has become enabled on your device to provide increased fluidity and additional frame rates on your 2D applications.
GPU Rendering is a process of transforming high-dimensional graphical instructions into low-dimensional graphical information with the help of the Graphics Processing Unit. In this process, GPU is used to generate 2D or 3D images from the model by the means of computer programs automatically.
As the GPUs are specially constructed for processing graphical instructions related to gaming, animation, and rendering industries, so it takes the graphical instructions away from the CPU in order to generate far much better results as compared to that CPU produces.
GPU Renderer also called GPU Render engine and a GPU-accelerated Renderer is a program that is engineered based on the principles on which light physics, visual perception, mathematics are based on.
Some popular GPU Renderers available in the market are Arnold (Autodesk), Iray (NVIDIA), Octane (Otoy), etc.
Since GPUs are known to consume more power as compared to CPUs, so using it on Android devices with strong processing power is not recommended. Keeping it ON all the time on such devices will only reduce your battery life by 10-15% and will also not do much good for your device.
But using it on the devices with weaker CPUs having an operating system lower than quad-core will be helpful in getting smoother UI animations with less lagging while using 2D applications.
So if you want to enable the Force GPU Rendering option on your device then the detailed steps of it are described in the above section.
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