How Flutter 3.13’s Impeller Boosts Performance Across Devices

Flutter's quarterly stable release 3.13 brings improvements to the new graphics renderer Impeller and adds a fresh Engine API for foldable devices.

On iOS, Impeller optimizations cut latency and eliminate shader‑compilation issues, delivering smoother performance.

Official benchmarks show Impeller now raises average throughput, surpassing previous results; compared with the Skia renderer, the average frame rasterization time in the flutter/gallery transition benchmark has been halved.

Since version 3.10, Flutter announced wide‑gamut color support when using Impeller, and after user feedback, wide‑gamut colors are now the default on iOS.

The Flutter team notes that work on Impeller's Vulkan backend is progressing but not yet ready for a preview, aiming for a high‑quality initial experience on Android.

A stable preview of Impeller for Android is slated for later this year. In 2022, hardware‑abstraction‑layer optimizations benefited both OpenGL and Vulkan backends, noticeably improving average frame rasterization time in the flutter/gallery conversion benchmark on Android.

Ongoing efforts continue to raise the quality of the Android preview.

Impeller preview is also available for macOS; users can follow the guidance on the Impeller page to test and enable it in their applications.

Flutter now adds a new API to retrieve display properties. The new getter FlutterView.display returns a Display object reporting physical size, device‑pixel‑ratio, refresh rate, and other parameters.

Additionally, on iOS, TextField automatically offers an option that uses the device camera to recognize characters and insert them into the field.