Android Development: How to get GPU Acceleration for your AVDs

I was quite excited when I first read the news that the Android Emulator now supports using your PC's GPU for better graphics performance.  Trouble is, the aforementioned announcement doesn't contain any information on how it works.  I only discovered the answer thanks to Google's revamped developer site, wherein I stumbled across an emulator setup guide I had never seen before (I'm assuming that it actually was there before, and that it isn't a brand new page.  I could very well be wrong on that).

Anyway, the answer is found in the settings page for your virtual device. In the hardware section, you can click "New", and choose the "GPU Emulation" property.  Set it to yes, and your graphics card will be put to work (provided it is supported; I'm not sure how well it works in all environments).

Click the 'New' button in the 'Hardware' section, and you'll be able to add GPU emulation as a property (It's shown at the bottom of the property list here).

So far, the results are impressive.  The virtual device still takes a while to load up (though not as long as it did when I first tinkered with the SDK, years ago), but once it's on, it is very smooth and responsive, enough so to make it worthwhile for testing.  This could make it much easier to test future projects on multiple device types.

The guide above also explains how to configure Virtual Machine acceleration, using the VM extensions  supported by modern processors.  This is another welcome feature for improving emulator performance, but it looks more complicated to setup.  Namely, you have to enable the VM extensions for your CPU via the BIOS, and install extra virtualization drivers.  The drivers are the real showstopper, as the guide warns that they can conflict with the drivers for other VM software like Virtualbox.  The fix is to only enable one set of drivers at a time - this is easy enough in a *nix environment, but I'd have to go and find out what Vitrualbox installs.

Once you've got your drivers under control, there's one last caveat; to use VM acceleration, your virtual device has to be running an x86 CPU, rather than the traditional ARM chip.  This isn't really a problem - Intel has already put out an x86 based phone, and the support is there.  You just have to remember to take the extra step, because these AVDs go to ARM by default.

If I dip my toes into this CPU virtualization, I'll come back here with my findings.