Does GLSurfaceView.onPause() destroy the context?

Question

I'm using GLSurfaceView.onPause() to manage resources (i.e. stop the rendering thread to allow a more responsive view to be presented). It appears to be require the surface to be re-created but I haven't seen this detailed in the documentation.

Can someone confirm that this is the case?

Cheers, Josh

Answer 1

Yes that is the case. But if you want to improve the responsiveness of another view or dialog for a limited amount of time you have some other options.

• if you target api level 11 or higher you can use setPreserveEGLContext on the GLSurfaceView
• you can use setRenderMode(RENDERMODE_WHEN_DIRTY)
• you can set a flag and in your onDrawFrame() you return early if this flag is set.

Answer 2

yes it will be recreated on pause because glView extends SurfaceView and SurfaceView always recreates when activity goes on pause.