Depends on the usage, depends on the device.

New devices and new OS versions (Jelly Bean) support hardware acceleration on Canvas drawing. Older systems (60% of devices in the wild) a will keep everything on the main processor.

So for 60% of devices the images will be manipulated uncompressed, will not use video memory, and get no special treatment. Performance will be approximately linear based on the number of items drawn.

If you have 50 or 100 blits to the Canvas, you should be able to reach a reasonable framerate even on old devices. More blits = more memory requirements for each image you are drawing and more CPU time to do the work.

If that is sufficient for your game, then go for it.

Of course you can get much higher performance with OpenGL ES and take advantage of batch operations, compressed textures, asynchronous specialized hardware and memory, and all the other goodies it gives you. But if your game doesn't require it, there is no need to force you down that path.

OpenGL is good. Iam currently studying android game development. I will encourage you to read the pdf.

"Beginning Android Game Development".

It has an opengl tutorial at chapter 7. Goodluck.

OpenGL is good. Iam currently studying android game development. I will encourage you to read the pdf.

"Beginning Android Game Development".

It has an opengl tutorial at chapter 7. Goodluck.

Why dont you guys use an engine built on top of OpenGL? For example: www.andengine.org

Best,

- Pedro / RoTTer