I have looked into some of the performance aspects of the Android port, and I’ve come to some conclusions. Firstly, after looking at the disassembly, there did not seem to be any additional code associated with exception handling, so there was no optimizing to be done there. Secondly, the compile flags meant that software floating point operations were used, rather than the built-in hardware FPU.
So I added compile flags to force hardware floats, and added armv6 instructions while I was at it. You can get the installer here.
This gives my phone a nice 50% boost in frame-rate to about 15fps. However, on some devices this app may fail to run. This change brings the performance in line with iPhone performance for the simulation side of the program. However the OpenGL seemed slower. I guess the Qualcomm MSM 7227 does not have strong 3D acceleration \- or perhaps I am still missing something?
For comparison, you can test the flash version of the code in this directory. I get about 6\-7 fps, which is not too far from my initial software-float based results and is quite impressive. I’m not sure if the flash renderer is using software or hardware rendering \- maybe it’s worth a closer look to find out what it’s doing.
