Major performance impakt after Android upgrade to 4.3 and 4.4

[wizzy]

Hi all

I'm experiencing a noticable performance downfall after migrating from Android 4.2.2 on my Xperia Z1 (since i only play Tekken 5 and 6 i cannot say whether it is a common problem among other games).
After the upgrade game started to jitter very often affecting performance on Tekken 5 and in case of Tekken 6 making the game close to unplayable. I've noticed that turning of multithreading is fixing this problem but then overall framerate is lower than on 4.2.2.

Can it be due to different scheduling algorithm in new Android systems?

[313Mhz]

hi
unfortunaly i do not know your answer.
but i had same problem with xperia z1 (android 4.3).
i though it would run perfect because of its uniqe hardware but when i run takken 5 it wasnt realy what i excepted! and had lag and i think its because of its gpu (adreno) that its not compatable for this emulator sadly.
before this i tested the huawei g610 (power vr sgx 544 and android 4.2.1) and it has a very good (not perfect) performance.
but as far as i know the best device for this emulator is those that have the mali gpu such galaxy note 2 that can run games good enough (games like gow).

[wizzy]

But while using android 4.2.2 i was achiving full speed in Tekken 5 and i had a "full speed" Tekken 6 with one frame skipping on. After i switch to 4.3 and 4.4 the magic dissappeared.

[Henrik]

Weird, I have no idea why that would happen. Could Qualcomm's graphics drivers really get any worse?

Maybe some new power management is screwing things up too, downclocking the CPU at the wrong time...

[wizzy]

Well the way game jitters looks more like resource allocation/access issue. Like this process would have lower priority or sth because between the breaks the frame rate is better. Could it be that in the new android ppsspp is not recognised as high consumption game type app hence it got lower priority ( in benchmarks i got better scores on 4.4)?

[zxcvbad]

I guess z1 kitkat update brought a newer GPU driver revision which is v@66. Each newer revision supposed to solve numerous bugs, but in reality it's even worse with each newer revision. You could look at gfxbench driver overhead benchmark to see how bad is adreno drivers. It's even worse than tegra 3 in this specific test..

[wizzy]

Is it possible to somehow extract drivers from previous Android and deploy them on the 4.4?

[zxcvbad]

You could flash dev driver to nexus 5 from Qualcomm developer board, but that driver also has some bugs. I'm not sure if someone has tried to flash it to other devices, driver is for adreno 330 but stated as for nexus 5.

[gnubaver]

Exactly the same problem as topic starter!

Had AWESOME performance using Xperia Z1 (Same phone) on 4.3
99% perfect emulation on almost everything i tested.

And now when updating to 4.4 everything has gone to ****

Tried every setting possible and even in the most simple games i get 27 fps and stutter/hickups. And sometimes 60 fps, but absolutley not stable. It can acheive 60 fps but its going up and down.

This problem equals total sadness.

[wizzy]

In the end i gave up kitkat and went back to 4.2. After general customisation it runs very well.
However i've notice that as playtime goes by, the performance falls and jitter begins. I thought that it may be some memory managment issue but memory usage stays around the same. I've blocked CPU to run at full speed at all time. Any clues why it happens? When i pause a game it recovers for a minute or two but then again game jitters.

@zxcvbad About that driver flash. Could i just compile drivers while at dualrecovery terminal? Does android goes with c compiler by default?

[an07her]

Same story with my Note 3.
Perfect when was Android 4.3.
Now with Android 4.4.2 OpenGL drivers are V66 and laggy as shit.

[Henrik]

You'll have to complain to Qualcomm about this one, I can do nothing about poor driver updates

[tiktakt0w]

(03-31-2014 02:16 PM)Henrik Wrote:  You'll have to complain to Qualcomm about this one, I can do nothing about poor driver updates

I personally haven't experienced any kind of performance drops after upgrading my phone to 4.4.2. My device doesn't have the S801 though so my info might be irrelevant (My phone has a Snapdragon S4 Pro).

Do you still have your Nexus 4? Any comments on performance after updating to Kitkat? Performance in PPSSPP of course.

[zxcvbad]

Quote:Could i just compile drivers while at dualrecovery terminal? Does android goes with c compiler by default?

dev drivers

Known driver bugs for Adreno 3xx (v45,v53, v53 (dev), v66):
glBufferSubData/glMapBufferRange stall driver
glBufferSubData causes new internal buffer - OOM error
Broken dynamic Uniform buffer member access
glVertexAttributePointer with type UNSIGNED_BYTE broken glGetShaderInfoLog returns max 1023 byte string

In many cases, the gpu clock is tied to the processor clock, and sometimes this affects things.

Another thing, Snapdragon is always using governer ondemand, plus there were few articles about Qualcomm's disappointing NEON/VeNum performance

[gnubaver]

The only fix is to downgrade ?