AdMob banners lower my precious frame-rate

Android Android Development
1

As I am adding AdMob ads to my game I discover that some of the banners are animated and this causes a unacceptable drop in frame-rate.

It is only the text ads that cause the problem because they are animated, but I suppose some image ads could also be animated. Also it seems that not all banner types have animation but I cannot find any guarantee for this in the documentation.

On the AdMob pages one can tick of weather to accept images or text, but it seems to have no effect on the delivered ad. ( I’ve only tested this with the test ad ). Also I read that AdMob do not let you influence what ad types are displayed.

I’ve also tried AdView.pause(), but this seems to have no effect either ( tested on test ad ).

Is it possible to have banner ads in a part of a game where high frame-rate essential?

Is it possible to limit the resources used by the AdMob banners?

Are there ad providers that better cater to my needs?

How are other people dealing with this issue?

2

I think there was something with hardware acceleration that caused it. Try using android:hardwareAccelerated=“false” in the AndroidManifest (but I don’t know if for the whole application or only ads or only your app activity…).

3

I just tried that now, and it didn’t work. Mabe it worked a little bit, but my game is a (almost, except for very small, far apart gc hickups) constant 62fps and the difference from full, constant fps to irregular fps is like night and day.

Currently I’m just disabling the banner during play and only having it in the menu. This works.

Mabe there is some other ad provider that delivers some static image pay per impression banners that I can use during play.

4

Yes it is possible. You can use admob display ad on any screen of your game. You can also try other platform to show ad in your app.

5

Disabling the ad during game play is a good idea anyway - instead add interstitial to make up for the lost revenue.

6

Think of it this way… its only slow… it did not crash your app like a LOT of other advert toolkits :frowning:

7

I think interstitials are a better choice for games. You don’t have to worry about banners taking up some of your screen or slowing your framerate. Interstitials can be preloaded and shown when you want to. Also they generally earn more than banners.

8

Still in my test they seemed to get worse reaction from users than banners visible the whole time for some reason. But users are getting more and more used to them I suppose, so it will quickly change if it haven’t already.