So Ive been testing the latest build of ARC on my Galaxy S24 Ultra, Android 16 to see how the new process handling impacts CPU and GPU usage. That’s been my biggest problem with ARC, high usage, phone gets hot and battery drains fast.
I’m linking a screen recording with usage graphs from GPU Watch but basically here’s what I found:
Home screen: once the content loads, GPU sits almost idle - massive improvement.
Scrolling around and generally usage feels much snappier and smoother. Spikes in GPU usage only occur when there is content like graphic blocks or album covers loading. Once they load, GPU returns to idle.
The big problem is once you start playing something. The now playing screen uses up to 80% GPU, while the only moving graphic is the track progress dot. Additionally, this high usage carries over to the rest ARC once you leave the now playing screen. The currently playing graphic at the bottom of your screen also has a progress dot and it seems to also consume a lot of GPU resources on other screens that were, when nothing was playing, leaving the GPU on idle.
As far as I saw in my testing of other apps prior to this build, e.g. Tidal’s progress bar dot barely consumes any GPU and keeps screen refresh rate at 24fps. ARC keep the refresh rate maxed.
If you could look into that resource consumption on such a small piece of graphic, that would be great.