Why does my Samsung Tab Pro 12.2 jerk through a simple animation?

[AC Question]

(I asked this above but had a typo in the link. Didn't see a way to edit so reposted.)

I just bought a Tab Pro 12.2 tablet and was extremely disappointed to see it jerk through the opening Ken Burns animations at www-dot-zoespicks-dot-com. (This is my first post here so they don't want me posting a link.) I thought at first it might be a poor WiFi connection, but an HP Pavillion laptop on the same network goes through the animations fine. And an iPad does them fine. Plus, a bad network connection would only make the first load slow. Refreshing the page should get it from cache and play it normally. But the refresh on the Samsung also jerks. So I'm thinking that the Tab Pro just has a really puny processor that can't hack it. Does anyone have any ideas what the problem is here?

Before I bought this tablet I checked out the Tab Pro 12.2 on display at Best Buy and it also jerked through these animations but the salesman said it was just because they had so many things on the network that it was slow, so I went ahead and bought it.

Thanks for any input.

Steve

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Are you talking about the those slowly panning/zooming shots? They hesitate on my Chromebook as well (and my Chromebook's performance is pretty good), so it's not just your tablet.

 

[toonbon]

Yes, those panning/zooming shots are what I'm talking about. They animate ok on smart phones but some tablets have trouble with them. The animation is done with jQuery animation. jQuery basically generates the next CSS data values, 20 times a second, or whatever, and outputs them. It shouldn't be any harder to crank out the new values in a tablet than it is in a smart phone, but a tablet has four times as many pixels to apply each set of values to so I suspect that the problem here is in the GPU: it can't repaint all the pixels fast enough. The Tab Pro 12.2 stutters through the animation. The Kindle Fire is even worse. You say your Chromebook hesitates. Yet the iPad Air 2 plays the animation as smooth as silk.

It seems that Samsung basically kept the same GPU from the phone while the pixels went up 4X. Apple, on the other hand, increased the GPU performance by 2.5X just going from the Air to the Air 2 and it seems likely that they also made a big improvement going from the iPhone to the iPad.

I build websites with these effects and I sell them by showing businesses on a tablet what I did for a similar business. There can't be any stuttering or jerking while showing the effect if I'm going to get the job. The solution for me, therefore, was to buy an iPad Air 2 and send back the Samsung Tab Pro 12.2. But I'm very interested in anyone else's opinion or thoughts.

Thanks
Steve

 

[B. Diddy]

I'm not a web designer, so I won't pretend that I know much about it--but maybe I can still help by asking some dumb questions ...

I guess you already sent the Tab Pro back, but did you see how the animation was on different browsers, like Chrome or Opera? I'm assuming the jerkiness you saw was on the stock Internet browser. Maybe it's peculiar to how some browsers renders animations. Could it be that jQuery is more optimized for Safari?

Interestingly, the animation is now smooth on my Chromebook. Maybe I had a bad connection at the time, because it was pausing briefly, rather than panning crudely. I tried the website on my Nexus 5 running Chrome, and the panning there was more crude than smooth, which is what I'm guessing you're referring to.

 

[toonbon]

The Tab Pro looks like it has Chrome as the current browser. I do still have it and would be interested in trying Safari. Do you know how to put Safari on the Tab Pro?

 

[B. Diddy]

Safari isn't available on Android. Safari and Chrome are both built on Webkit, so I'm not sure what other differences in Safari might be making it work better there (if that's in fact the issue). Have you tried Opera or Dolphin, or the stock Internet browser?

 

[toonbon]

No, but I think I'm just going to send it back at this point. It's time to more forward. Thanks for your help.