Imagination Technologies has some advanced tools such as PowerVRTune in their Powervr Graphics SDK, but they’ve now released a simple tool called PVRMonitor to display real-time CPU and GPU usage for Android devices featuring PowerVR GPUs. In some firmware, Android’s Developer Settings have options to enable CPU and GPU usage, but in my phone for example, this is not available, so this app may be handy to check whether your system or app is taking too many resources.
- CPU
- Total Pixel – Load in percent of the pixel processing hardware including texturing, raster operation and fragment shader processing. If nothing is modified on the screen it should be zero, and if it is too high during games for example, the game code may need to be optimized.
- Total Vertex – Load in percent of the vertex processing hardware including vertex processing in the ALUs, work in the Tile Accelerator and related stall time.
- ALU: Pixel – Percentage of time that the ALUs have spent processing pixel shaders.
- ALU: Vertex – Percentage of time that the ALUs have spent processing vertex shaders.
PVRMonitor will display an overlay on top of Android showing CPU and GPU usage, and in the home screen, everything should be close to zero after a few seconds. CPU0 may have small bursts due to CPU usage, and if you scroll the screen you’ll see Total Pixel go around 50%.
I’ve run Antutu for fun, and to see what happens for different tasks.
If for some reasons you can’t access Google Play, PVRMonitor is also available as an apk.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
