A Word on gfxBoost

I’m sure all of our frequent readers saw Aaron’s posting the other day on Chainfire’s release of GfxBoost. I just want to take a second to explain what Chainfire is doing and why we all need to thank him.

First off, Chainfire is legendary for his work on the Kaiser/Tilt drivers so he has a long history of working on getting video drivers to work despite Qualcomm’s best efforts to ensure they are crippled. The goal of GfxBoost is to get the performance of proper video drivers, but of course, we’re lacking the drivers. To get around this he has been working to enhance the speed of memory transfer without impacting the CPU giving us the video performance we’ve been looking for. In his own words:

Of course my final goal is to get this fully operational all the time on all supported devices, and in GDI mode (‘typical’ Windows Mobile 2D applications) at that.

Right now what the program exploits is actually a very round-about way of ‘getting it done’, involving all kinds of drivers and WM core files that are strictly speaking not necessary to pull it off, as I have simply not figured out how to perform this trick on a lower level yet. I know the general direction, but its still under investigation.

Some devices/ROMs are seeing significant improvements in a lot of different areas of graphics performance while others are reporting nominal changes but the changes will be most significant in applications that are graphic-heavy. Internally, I can tell you that a lot of the guys that are right here working on MobilityDigest\FuzeMobility\TiltMobility have nothing but rave reviews and consider this a required app on any WM phone.

Currently the project is up to v1.1 which installs in the settings and can run silently in the background. It’s still a work in progress despite the fact that it’s shown a lot of improvements already but it’s time for everyone to take their hats off and thank Chainfire for what he’s done so far and to promote his continued efforts…and while your hat is off you may want to also reach into your pocket and buy him a few beers to keep him focused:) The official XDA post is here as well as his donation link.  Thanks again to Chainfire for his efforts and assistance.