I’ve been receiving a lot of feedback from users where they tell me that while they could get great performance with r17, all of a sudden with r18 audio is crackling like mad even with threaded video turned on.
I think this is as a result of the changes that were made to the OpenSL driver for low audio-latency devices (Android 4.1) and up. I think we need variable buffer size options - one appealing to high-latency audio (like before), and the other for low-latency audio (like it is right now).
For that matter I can confirm that this does affect older devices. For instance, this el-cheapo Cortex A8 Android tablet I’ve been using since last year now no longer gets decent performance with any core - audio just stutters too badly and this reduces the FPS as well. This is with or without threaded video enabled.
So long story short maister - I think we need toggleable options for latency in OpenSL and expose this in the Java menu.
We definitely want to retain the current configuration (it runs great on Shield, should run great on the new Nexus 7 as well), but we should definitely offer an option to get the old buffer sizes and configuration back for the people on older devices that can’t match the low-latency requirements anyway.