We on the RenderScript team thank you for your support over the years. We understand that transitions are never easy; our focus on cross-platform APIs such as Vulkan will mean even better tools and support for your GPU-accelerated applications.
Google will deprecate RenderScript and use Vulkan instead in Android 12
Google announced today that with the launch of Android 12.0, they will deprecate the RenderScript API. In the future, Android developers should mainly develop for the Vulkan API to meet the needs of high-performance computing.
RenderScript has become an API for heterogeneous CPU/GPU programming in the system since Android 3.0 and even became an API for 3D rendering for a while. However, with the implementation of GPU computing through Vulkan and even OpenGL, RenderScript is of little significance today. Some current Android devices only support RenderScript that only uses the CPU to execute, and with the launch of Android 12.0, these APIs will be deprecated.
Android developers should plan to use the Vulkan compute/graphics API to handle performance-sensitive code paths and transfer workloads to the GPU.
For those old devices that lack sufficient Vulkan support, Google has also open-sourced a library that provides highly optimized CPU implementations for most RenderScript internal functions-except for BLAS, other functions can be implemented in this open-source library. Compared with the previous RenderScript support, this new replacement library shows faster execution for the CPU.
Google said in the Android Developers Blog:
