July digest: input latency, asset sizes and a frame under the microscope

The summer pieces share a method: measure the stage you are about to change, not the whole frame. One article takes the audio path apart stage by stage; the other does the same for a single frame. Between them are two news items whose numbers surprised us, including the one where compression tuning saved twelve megabytes and texture formats saved a hundred and eighty.

• Gamepad to photon: measuring input latency end to end

  Bluetooth controllers added 38 to 74 ms on the phones we tested. The render path added another 33 to 50.

• The asset half of APK size

  Compression tuning saved 12 MB. Texture formats saved 180 MB. Order matters.

• Low-latency audio: AAudio, Oboe and the numbers behind the knob

  Buffer size, performance mode and sample rate, with measurements from five devices.

• Profiling one frame: where 16.6 ms actually goes

  A frame budget split into CPU, GPU and presentation, using Perfetto and a timestamp query.

If a benchmark summary only shows you averages, it is hiding the frames players complain about.