JELLY BEAN 4.3

Welcome to Android 4.3, a sweeter version of Jelly Bean!

Android 4.3 includes performance optimizations and great new features for users and developers. This document provides a glimpse of what's new for developers.

See the Android 4.3 APIs document for a detailed look at the new developer APIs.

Faster, Smoother, More Responsive

Android 4.3 builds on the performance improvements already included in Jelly Bean — vsync timing, triple buffering, reduced touch latency, CPU input boost, andhardware-accelerated 2D rendering — and adds new optimizations that make Android even faster.

For a graphics performance boost, the hardware-accelerated 2D renderer now optimizes the stream of drawing commands, transforming it into a more efficient GPU format by rearranging and merging draw operations. For multithreaded processing, the renderer can also now use multithreading across multiple CPU cores to perform certain tasks.

Android 4.3 also improves rendering for shapes and text. Shapes such as circles and rounded rectangles are now rendered at higher quality in a more efficient manner. Optimizations for text include increased performance when using multiple fonts or complex glyph sets (CJK), higher rendering quality when scaling text, and faster rendering of drop shadows.

Improved window buffer allocation results in a faster image buffer allocation for your apps, reducing the time taken to start rendering when you create a window.

For highest-performance graphics, Android 4.3 introduces support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and makes it accessible to apps through both framework and native APIs. On supported devices, the hardware accelerated 2D rendering engine takes advantage of OpenGL ES 3.0 to optimize texture management and increase gradient rendering fidelity.

OpenGL ES 3.0 for High-Performance Graphics

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Android 4.3 introduces platform support for Khronos OpenGL ES 3.0

, providing games and other apps with highest-performance 2D and 3D graphics capabilities on supported devices. You can take advantage of OpenGL ES 3.0 and related EGL extensions using either framework APIs or native API bindings through the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).

Key new functionality provided in OpenGL ES 3.0 includes acceleration of advanced visual effects, high quality ETC2/EAC texture compression as a standard feature, a new version of the GLSL ES shading language with integer and 32-bit floating point support, advanced texture rendering, and standardized texture size and render-buffer formats.

You can use the OpenGL ES 3.0 APIs to create highly complex, highly efficient graphics that run across a range of compatible Android devices, and you can support a single, standard texture-compression format across those devices.

OpenGL ES 3.0 is an optional feature that depends on underlying graphics hardware. Support is already available on Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 4, and Nexus 10 devices.