RenderScript is an Android-specific compute API offered by Google. It offers accelerated compute performance with portability between Android devices.
RenderScript is an Android compute API offered by Google. It offers accelerated compute performance with portability between Android devices.
The RenderScript runtime operates as an asynchronous low-level interface to the traditional Android application controlling it. Memory allocation and binding is performed by the controlling Android application, with both the application and runtime environment able to read and write the memory asynchronously.
For graphics operations, RenderScript is essentially a wrapper for the OpenGL ES 2.0 API's, guaranteed to run on all Android devices supporting an API level of 11 (3.0) or higher. It allows for the use of OpenGL ES 2.0's programmable pipeline while providing easy support for a fixed function pipeline if desired.
Documentation for RenderScript is currently very limited, however the example applications included in
sdk_root/samples/android-11/RenderScript
provide a great deal in the way of examples demonstrating the capabilities of RenderScript.
Some links of interest for RenderScript are:
Android Developers - RenderScript The official Google documentation for RenderScript. Currently lacking in some areas but with some effort, sufficient to explain nearly all aspects of RenderScript.
Android Developer Blog about built-in Renderscript Features Presents and discusses the built-in features, from blur to convolve matrix and their supposed performance
Google Code page of RenderScript Examples The examples provided here are a great extension of the sample projects provided with the Android SDK, and really begin to show the full scope of what can be done in the RenderScript environment.