Game Performance on Android sucks

Ashley question out of curiosity - are there cases where driver bugs affect cordova app performance but not chrome performance?

Yep.

Also the Chrome browser and the WebView (used in Cordova apps) have different GPU driver blacklists, which means you can get fast GPU acceleration in the Chrome browser but slow software rendering in the APK. It's also really hard to identify because chrome://gpu in the browser will tell you everything's OK, but when you run in an APK everything's slower. So it's entirely possible a GPU driver bug affecting only the WebView is either causing poor performance only in the APK, or has caused Google to blacklist the GPU driver only in the APK. That would explain what's being observed here (but this is currently a theory, there isn't proof yet).

The vast majority of devices should not be affected by issues like this. It's just an unlucky few. And GPU driver issues affect pretty much all gaming technology, and frequently in worse ways (e.g. blank screen or startup crashes for native apps - at least web tech can get the game to run)

Oh, let's not do this again. Those platforms had far worse problems of their own (game-ending memory leaks, whole categories of plugins that didn't work, etc. etc.)

GPU driver bugs are pretty much random, and the fact some different technology works around one specific problem, does not work around the fact that GPU driver bugs can easily ruin your day whatever you're doing. It's an industry-wide problem.

I could send my APK to a trustworthy individual to run on a mid to low end device??

Oh, let's not do this again. Those platforms had far worse problems of their own (game-ending memory leaks, whole categories of plugins that didn't work, etc. etc.)

GPU driver bugs are pretty much random, and the fact some different technology works around one specific problem, does not work around the fact that GPU driver bugs can easily ruin your day whatever you're doing. It's an industry-wide problem.

come on ashley :D

you know it, a lot of a lot of people are reporting performance issue.

how ludei did fix this with his simple canvas+ plugin? it's a vey small plugin size and it fix the performance lag.

Apparently Godot sucks balls on Android, and just seen the price of the mobile exporters for GMS2. May have a play with Unity. If my driver is blacklisted on APK I will see the same problems....if not..........

> question out of curiosity - are there cases where driver bugs affect cordova app performance but not chrome performance?

Yep.

Also the Chrome browser and the WebView (used in Cordova apps) have different GPU driver blacklists, which means you can get fast GPU acceleration in the Chrome browser but slow software rendering in the APK.

Oh. I would always test my project by using Chrome on Android, as I assumed that this was a good way to see the performance of my project on mobile.

I always thought to worry about building APK's nearer the end of a project, as long as my project worked well in Chrome. If anything, I thought there'd be a performance boost when doing a final APK build, since it's a stripped down Chrome, but I see.

Is there a workaround available for people that have this? Can we change the GPU blacklists if they're different per app? Or force to ignore the blacklist on all devices?

Not really buying the whole my GPU is blacklisted, based on how I see my other games playing - including Dead Cells on this phone.

The blacklist would only affect games using the webview, i.e. any game from any html5 engine. Games which are compiled into native apps don't use webview. Dead Cells is compiled into native C code. Fun fact is that Dead Cells actually runs it's gameplay code at 30fps, but just render at 60fps.

Maybe you can try some of the other Android games in the Made with Construct 3 sub-forum and see how they perform on your phone.

Apparently the idea of testing other phones has gone out the window.

Apparently the idea of testing other phones has gone out the window.

I will just dust off my other 40 android phones

Process of elimination.

Might want to consider who your target audience is, unless it's just you.

Is there any way to display information like chrome://gpu on an exported apk?

Process of elimination.

Might want to consider who your target audience is, unless it's just you.

I bought a mid end phone to check performance on lower end devices, expecting a single viewport application with 300 events and 80 sprites to be a good first game to launch. I don't have a better phone to test it on, so at the moment i have no way of knowing if it will be crap for everyone.