Google will abandon RenderScript in Android 12 and switch to Vulkan

Google announced today that with the launch of Android 12.0, they will deprecate the RenderScript API. In the future, Android developers should mainly develop for the Vulkan API to meet high-performance computing needs.

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RenderScript has been an API for heterogeneous CPU/GPU programming in the system since Android 3.0, and even became an API for 3D rendering for a while. However, with the implementation of GPU computing through Vulkan and even OpenGL, the significance of RenderScript is not great nowadays. Some current Android devices only support RenderScript executed only by the CPU, and with the launch of Android 12.0, these APIs will be deprecated.

Android developers should plan to use the Vulkan compute/graphics APIs to handle performance-sensitive code paths, offloading the workload to the GPU.

For older devices that lack adequate Vulkan support, Google has also open-sourced a library that provides highly optimized CPU implementations for most RenderScript intrinsics—all except BLAS. This new replacement library has been shown to perform faster on the CPU than the previous RenderScript support.

"We on the RenderScript team thank you for your support over the years, and we understand that transitioning is never easy," Google said in a post on the Android Developers Blog. "Our focus on cross-platform APIs like Vulkan will mean better tooling and support for your GPU-accelerated apps."

This article is reproduced from OSCHINA

Title of this article: Google will abandon RenderScript in Android 12 and use Vulkan instead

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