Thursday, December 22, 2011

Help us fix hardware acceleration for Adreno 200 based devices

Sandvold, a developer from XDA, currently working on an Ice Cream Sandwich ROM for the HTC Desire, has made a proposition that is most likely to succeed in its main objective.
You can track his progress on the ROM on his website. You may try it for yourself, if you're a Desire owner, and see how well the hacked hardware acceleration works -- not very well! :(


Sandvold asks that we send an e-mail to the CEO of Qualcomm, asking for the GPU drivers that are much needed in order to make the hardware acceleration work.


As you may know, Android 4.0 ICS is relying on the GPU to accelerate the user interface. Since HTC and Google dropped support for the Google Nexus One and related devices (such as the HTC Desire) -- all using the Adreno 200 GPU, by Qualcomm -- base drivers are out of date. Our only hope is the development community AND Qualcomm. Many developers from XDA, including the CyanogenMod team, are hard at work trying to hack the hardware acceleration, but this may not be possible as soon as we would hope without Qualcomm's drivers.




This is what you can do to help us : send an e-mail to the address pjacobs@qualcomm.com, with the subject QSD 8250, Adreno 200 hardware-related proprietary libraries for hardware graphics acceleration.
The content of the message should look like below, but perhaps you could edit it a bit (a bit more, actually) or write your own wall of text, so it doesn't get marked as spam...

As a mobile devices enthusiast, I am here to ask Qualcomm to be a real community oriented company.

You are well aware of the Hardware Accelerated User Interface in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, that relies heavily on GPU of the device. Google, with its Android Open Source Project, has decided not to support the Google Nexus One, HTC Desire and related devices. As community users, we have long stopped relying on HTC and Google to support these devices - this is now a community effort that brings joy to millions of people, and is a true development pass time for many.

Since the ICS source outing, many community projects have been started to bring the new platform to older devices, but all of them (for devices based on this and similiar platforms) are missing the proprietary user space drivers, needed for the Hardware Acceleration to work.

I believe it would be a great move for a company like Qualcomm to support advanced users and enthusiast in their efforts to port Ice Cream Sandwich to Adreno 200 based devices.

I sincerely hope you will at least consider this request and decide to support the community - the same community that, with their enthusiasm, helped to make the smartphone market what it is today.

Take into account that we do not ask for much; it is just a set of compiled binaries that you surely have already, or are easy for you to make. We do not expect you to support the release, or do bugfixes. It would be even better if you could supply the source code - but let's not push it too far. 

Also, you can join us on the thread we created for this, on Qualcomm's Developer Network, and say your opinnion there and track the progress if you're interested!

I thank you in the name of all Adreno 200 based devices owners from XDA :D

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