How to get the ADT bundled emulator running at 60 fps or higher

I'm using the ADT bundled virtual device manager to test my application (using the Intel image and have installed HAXM as well), but the emulator is very sluggish.

My system's base config is:

Core i7 920 (overclocked) / GTX 590 / 8GB ram / Win7.64

I've allocated 512 MB of ram to the virtual device. I've also tried with 1GB and 2GB allocations, but they made no difference whatsoever - the sluggishness remained.

For various reasons, I cannot use other emulators along with virtual box. Is there a way I can get this default emulator to run smoothly like it would on a well powered smartphone, ensuring a constant draw rate of 60 fps or higher?

(On a side note: Is this a hardware limitation, and would upgrading to a very high end development machine, say one with a top-end Xeons, 16+ GB ram and SSD Raid configurations improve things?)

Solution

The Android Emulator is currently very slow.

However, if it's not already done you may enable the GPU.

If you are running the emulator from Eclipse, run your Android application using an AVD with the -gpu on option enabled:

In Eclipse, click your Android project folder and then select Run > Run Configurations...
In the left panel of the Run Configurations dialog, select your Android project run configuration or create a new configuration.
Click the Target tab.
Select the AVD you created in the previous procedure.
In the Additional Emulator Command Line Options field, enter: -gpu on
Run your Android project using this run configuration.

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