performance/rendering/overdraw.jd

page.title=Reducing Overdraw
page.metaDescription=Improve performance by reducing unnecessary rendering.

meta.tags="performance"
page.tags="performance"

@jd:body

<div id="qv-wrapper">
<div id="qv">

<h2>In this document</h2>
    <ol>

      <li>
        <a href="#understanding">Understanding Overdraw</a>
      </li>
      <li>
        <a href="#finding">Finding Overdraw Problems</a>
      </li>
      <li>
        <a href="#fixing">Fixing Overdraw</a>
      </li>
    </ol>
  </div>
</div>

<p>
An app may draw the same pixel more than once within a single frame, an event
called <em>overdraw</em>. Overdraw is usually unnecessary, and best
eliminated. It manifests itself as a performance problem by wasting GPU time to
render pixels that don't contribute to what the user sees on the screen.
</p>

<p>
This document explains overdraw: what it is, how to diagnose it, and actions you
can take to eliminate or mitigate it.
</p>

<h2 name="understanding">Understanding Overdraw</h2>

<p>
Overdraw refers to the system's drawing a pixel on the screen multiple times
in a single frame of rendering. For example, if we have a bunch of stacked UI
cards, each card hides a portion of the one below it.
</p>

<p>
However, the system still needs to draw even the hidden portions of the cards
in the stack. This is because stacked cards are rendered according to the
<a class="external-link"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painter%27s_algorithm">painter's
algorithm</a>: that is, in back-to-front order.
This sequence of rendering allows the system to apply proper alpha blending to
translucent objects such as shadows.
</p>

<h2 name="finding">Finding Overdraw Problems</h2>

<p>
The platform offers several tools to help you determine if overdraw is
affecting your app's performance. These tools are available right on the device,
and accessible by turning on <strong>Developer Settings</strong></a> under
<em>Settings</em>. For more information about device developer settings, see
<a href="/studio/run/device.html#developer-device-options">Run Apps on a
Hardware Device</a>.
</p>

<h3 id="dgot">Debug GPU overdraw tool</h3>

<p>
The Debug GPU Overdraw tool uses color-coding to show the number of times your
app draws each pixel on the screen. The higher this count, the
more likely it is that overdraw affects your app's performance.
</p>

<p>
For more information on how to use the tool, refer to the related
<a href="/studio/profile/dev-options-overdraw.html">walkthrough</a>
and
<a href="https://io2015codelabs.appspot.com/codelabs/android-performance-debug-gpu-overdraw#1">
codelab</a>.
</p>

<h3 id="pgrt">Profile GPU rendering tool</h3>

<p>
The Profile GPU Rendering tool displays, as a scrolling histogram, the time
each stage of the rendering pipeline takes to display a single frame. The
<em>Process</em> part of each bar, indicated in orange, shows when the system
is swapping buffers; this metric provides important clues about overdraw.
</p>

<p>
On less performant GPUs, available fill-rate (the speed at which the GPU can
fill the frame buffer) can be quite low. As the number of
pixels required to draw a frame increases, the GPU may take longer to process
new commands, and ask the rest of the system to wait until it can catch up.
The <em>Process</em> bar shows that this spike happens as the GPU gets
overwhelmed trying to draw pixels as fast as possible. Issues other than
raw numbers of pixels may also cause this metric to spike. For example,
if the Debug GPU Overdraw tool shows heavy overdraw and <em>Process</em> spikes,
there's likely an issue with overdraw.
</p>

<p class="note"><strong>Note: </strong>The
<a href="https://developer.android.com/studio/profile/dev-options-rendering.html">
Profile GPU Rendering</a> tool does not
work with apps that use the NDK. This is because the system pushes framework
messages to the background whenever OpenGL takes a full-screen context. In
such cases, you may find a profiling tool provided by the GPU manufacturer
helpful.</p>

<h2 name="fixing">Fixing Overdraw</h2>

<p>
There are several strategies you can pursue to reduce or eliminate overdraw:
</p>

<ul>
   <li>Removing unneeded backgrounds in layouts.</li>
   <li>Flattening the view hierarchy.</li>
   <li>Reducing transparency.</li>
</ul>

<p>
This section provides information about each of these approaches.
</p>

<h3 id="rubil">Removing unneeded backgrounds in layouts</h3>

<p>
By default, a layout does not have a background, which means it does not render
anything directly by itself. When layouts do have backgrounds, however, they may
contribute to overdraw.
</p>

<p>
Removing unnecessary backgrounds is a quick way of improving rendering
performance. An unnecessary background may never be visible because it's
completely covered by everything else the app is drawing on top of that
view. For example, the system may entirely cover up a parent's
background when it draws child views on top of it.
</p>

<p>
To find out why you're overdrawing, walk through the hierarchy in
the <a href="/studio/profile/hierarchy-viewer.html">Hierarchy Viewer</a> tool.
As you do so, look out for any backgrounds you can eliminate because
they are not visible to the user. Cases where many containers share a
common background color offer another opportunity to eliminate unneeded
backgrounds: You can set the window background to the main background color
of your app, and leave all of the containers above it with no background values
defined.
</p>

<h3 id="fvh">Flattening view hierarchy</h3>

<p>
Modern layouts make it easy to stack and layer views to produce beautiful
design. However, doing so can degrade performance by resulting in overdraw,
especially in scenarios where each stacked view object is opaque, requiring the
drawing of both seen and unseen pixels to the screen.
</p>

<p>
If you encounter this sort of issue, you may be able to improve performance by
optimizing your view hierarchy to reduce the number of overlapping UI objects.
For more information about how to accomplish this, see
<a href="/topic/performance/optimizing-view-hierarchies.html">Optimizing View
Hierarchies</a>.
</p>

<h3 id="rt">Reducing transparency</h3>

<p>
Rendering of transparent pixels on screen, known as alpha rendering, is a key
contributor to overdraw. Unlike standard overdraw,
in which the system completely hides existing drawn pixels by drawing
opaque pixels on top of them, transparent
objects require existing pixels to be drawn first, so that the right blending
equation can occur.  Visual effects like transparent animations, fade-outs, and
drop shadows all involve some sort of transparency, and can therefore contribute
significantly to overdraw. You can improve overdraw in these situations by
reducing the number of transparent objects you render. For example, you can get
gray text by drawing black text in a {@link android.widget.TextView} with a
translucent alpha value set on it. But you can get the same effect with far
better performance by simply drawing the text in gray.
</p>

<p>
To learn more about performance costs that transparency imposes throughout the
entire drawing pipeline, watch the video
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIy8g8yNhNk&index=46&list=PLWz5rJ2EKKc9CBxr3BVjPTPoDPLdPIFCE">
Hidden Costs of Transparency</a>.
</p>