A great way to check and see how well your device is performing, is by enabling Profile GPU Rendering so you can see how where frames are being dropped.
There are a number of ways that you can measure the performance of your smartphone or tablet. Many will quickly download a benchmarking application like AnTuTu or GeekBench. While those are great ways to test the actual hardware of your device, synthetic benchmarks aren’t the only thing that determines performance.
We also need to take software into consideration.
Sure, software can optimize benchmark numbers from AnTuTu and GeekBench, but that won’t matter if the core Android OS isn’t optimized properly. This is a big reason why you see so many people clamoring over stock Android, because it’s optimized very well. Samsung had/has a reputation of adding in so many features that it ruins the performance for even the smallest of tasks.
So today I want to show you how to monitor your dropped frames (which results in janky animations) by enabling the Profile GPU Rendering feature.
Enabling Profile GPU Rendering
- Enable Developer Mode
- Launch the Settings application
- Scroll down and tap on the ‘Developer Options’ option
- Locate and tap on the Profile GPU Rendering option
- Then tap on the ‘On Screen As Bars’ option
Explanation
If you’re the type who enjoys running benchmarks on your phone or tablet, then you’ll definitely want to know about the Profile GPU Rendering option as well. This feature is hidden within the Developer Options menu, and you can only access this by enabling Developer Mode. This doesn’t change anything drastic to your device, but it will give you a plethora of different options and features to tinker with by going into the new sub-menu.
You can follow the link in step 1 of the guide above if you are unfamiliar with how to enable Developer Mode on your phone. Once enabled, go ahead and launch the Settings application (or simply go back to the main Settings menu page) and then start scrolling through these options until you spot a feature called Profile GPU Rendering. I checked two devices (the Pixel XL with stock Android and the Redmi Note 3 Pro with CM13) and both had this feature close to the bottom.
Once you find it, go ahead and tap on it, and you should see a pop-up menu appear. There are three options to choose from here, and by default it is set to Off. There’s an option that will let you access this data via an adb shell, but you likely do not want this. Instead, you want to choose the On Screen As Bars option that is right in the middle. As soon as you select this option, you’ll see some bars appear at the bottom of the screen.
There’s also a green line that goes horizontally across the screen. From here, you’ll want to navigate through the phone doing whatever you normally do. Open apps, play games, etc. If you see one of these colored bars rise above the green horizontal line (like you see in the first image at the top of this page), then that means the Android OS has dropped animation frames. These dropped frames are what people normally mean when they say the Android OS is janky and laggy.
You’ll see this happen each time you go to a new page/app, and that is normal, but actually interacting with an application (like scrolling) shouldn’t drop any frames. Be sure to check the video above to get an example of what is okay and what isn’t.
