Hopefully this will help.
What is the difference between the 'Force GPU rendering' and '2d rendering'
on the Developers options? Should i have both enabled or just the one for 2d acceleration? Also what the 'Activate 4x MSSA in OpenGL' actually does?
Back in the day, Android's GUI wasn't fully hardware (GPU) accelerated, because the UI itself had more overhead than Apple's UI. Since GPUs have caught up, hardware rendering has become more common. Applications back then needed to take over the entire screen in order to use hardware rendering, but this is no longer the case. Despite this, there are still some applications that do not use hardware rendering for whatever reason. the last 3 holdouts on my device (Redbox, Amazon, Costco) have all added this at some point in the past year, so I don't know what apps still have this limitation.
Forcing GPU rendering will cause Android to perform a check at app launch - if the app already uses hardware acceleration, this feature then does literally nothing. If the application does not have hardware rendering, the phone will now try to force it. in many applications this will lead to smoother scrolling performance. In some, it will cause glitches and/or crashes. But for the majority of apps, it does literally nothing.
The 4xMSAA in OpenGL forces anti-aliasing in 3D (polygonal) games using OpenGL ES 1.1 to 2.0. It shouldn't work on newer games. The upside is that you may get smoother graphics on edges (reduces the stair-stepping effect, which wasn't a major issue in mobile to begin with). The downside is that it causes more overhead, which in turn reduces the framerate. The exception is a much older game with minimal overhead to begin with.
Check all 3 of them. The mssa is to help make picture clearer 3d graphics load faster
How to enable 4x MSAA in OpenGL ES 2.0 Android apps & games? - JayceOoi.com
While the 3D graphics can look smoother, they will not be faster. They can be the same speed (ideally), or slower (typical).
If you're using force GPU to overcome lag, all you'll get is more stutter and lag. You're treating the symptom of a much larger problem.
No.
In what scenario would force GPU actually be useful?
If you have an application with horrible scrolling lag that is older and known to not have invoked hardware assisted rendering in the OS, you can use this toggle to smooth out the scrolling with varying results.
When you're running a quadrant benchmark you'll get a higher score.
It won't affect any modern benchmarks.
