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Future Google Play Services updates may improve Snapdragon performance
Qualcomm's Neural Network API updates will be included in Google Play Services
Do you know what the Neural Networks API is? If you don't, it's fine, it's one of those surprisingly complex things that makes a lot of different parts of Android better without ever being very visible to the end user. Long story short: it allows developers to apply some of the extremely complicated parts of neural network processing to local Android hardware, getting a boost in performance in the background. And starting soon, it'll benefit from the same kind of regular driver updates that Qualcomm has been using for its GPU driver updates.
Yesterday, we got an eyeful of NVIDIA's new Tegra 4 and Tegra 4i, along with the Phoenix, NVIDIA's nifty reference device. The benchmarks were quite impressive compared to current-generation processors, but all we got to see in terms of gaming performance was a brief demo of Real Boxing.
Round and round and round she goes. Where she stops nob-holy mother of crap! That car just exploded! Okay, alright. Maybe I can understand a little bit of why folks like NASCAR. And in solidarity with my fellow southerners who adore the sport, allow me to share this with you: NASCAR Mobile '13.
Any self-respecting digital artist these days uses a graphics tablet to pipe pen input into PC applications. The problem is that good graphics tablets like the Wacom Intuos line are pretty spendy. If you've got an Android device lying around and like to use the GIMP image editor on Linux, you've got all you need for a basic graphics tablet setup thanks to a new app.
Android app developer Chainfire released an interesting app into the Market recently called Chainfire3D - "an intermediary OpenGL driver." Basically, this app sits between your app and the proprietary graphics driver on your device and can manipulate the commands between the two.