With Ice Cream Sandwich quickly spreading across Android devices like wildfire right now, new drivers for the Adreno 220 GPU found in the Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 have surfaced. These drivers can potentially lead to improved 2D UI rendering performance in ICS and, of course, increased benchmark scores.

XDA Senior Member gjcamp has produced recovery-flashable update.zip files that work across multiple devices with this hardware. Every phone running the Adreno 220 from the HTC Evo 3D to a couple variants of the Samsung Galaxy S2 may be able to benefit from these drivers, and there are currently seven different devices for which gjcamp has created threads. In his words:

…I have seen dramatically improved result on my Quadrant 3D scores with “Force 2D GPU rendering” UNCHECKED in the Setting->Develop Options Menu of this ICS Release. With this option checked I have seen improvements on both 2D and 3D. Although results are slightly degraded for 3D from post update the 2D results have doubled in value.

I can confirm this myself on my own Evo 3D that Quadrant scores were improved with these new drivers. Similarly, the 2D UI rendering does seem to be smoother, but this is always hard to measure objectively. As anyone who flashes bleeding edge tech to their phone knows, there could be side effects.

You can get started by visiting the threads in their respective sections listed below:

• HTC Amaze 4G
• HTC Vivid, Raider, Velocity
• HTC myTouch 4G Slide
• HTC EVO 3D CDMA
• HTC EVO 3D GSM
• HTC Sensation

Even if your device isn’t explicitly, the drivers may potentially work on your device, provided that you’re running an Adreno 220 GPU and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. However, if your phone’s not on the list, be extra careful and be sure to have a working backup to revert to.