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[Q] Touchwiz 3 launcher

Hi all,
I notice that when sliding through the app drawer of TW3, the finger tends to move some distance before the page starts following the finger. This is especially obvious when then page is stationary and the finger has to move some distance before the app drawer page stutters and starts moving.
After reading most if not all of the discussions in this forum, I understand that our phone sustain certain level of lag in that situation, probably due to the touch mechanism itself or inefficiency in the processor or what not. But I do have an interesting observation: whenever my phone sustains a fresh reboot, it is that time that the app drawer is perfectly lagless and follows even the tiniest movement of my fingers. This snappy phenomena only lasts until I put the phone to standby, i.e. locking the phone. Thereafter it goes back to the condition as mentioned earlier on.
My question is, there's no doubt i9003 has the capability to be lag free in the context of this discussion, but it seems pretty apparent that something is inhibiting the phone from being as smooth as when it first rebooted. Could it be the priority the TW launcher is assigned with, or does the processor clock speed matter in this situation?
P.S. When testing, I made sure that no applications are opened after the fresh reboot, so issues like insufficient memory etc should not be related here.

I noticed the same things, not only when sliding through the app drawer, but also when sliding menus etc. However after a reboot, my phone behaves as always. Maybe you feel it more lagfree because of the high clock speed due to the multiples stuff your phone does on boot. Try to change your governor to performance and see if it behaves like after a fresh reboot. In this way you'll know if your lagfree experience is due to clock speed.
I read a lot of stuff too but nothing was really useful. However I noticed that I feel lags only when the touch of the screen can be interpretated in different ways (for example sliding screens and opening apps), but when touching the screen allows you to do only one thing, like moving things, there are nearly zero lags. For example when you pull down/up your notification bar or when you move a zooomed image in gallery. This make me think that it's more a software problem than a hardware problem and I think that because in some app there are less lags than in others.
I don't know if you read this, but I think it improves the touchscreen, even if the difference is barely noticeable.

TW3 is sludge!

[Q] Input lag under ICS?

I just did a little test with the app Multitouch Visualizer 2 (https://market.android.com/details?...y5tZXRhbGV2Lm11bHRpdG91Y2gudmlzdWFsaXplcjIiXQ..) and I seem to get input lag fråm it.
It registers all 10 fingers just ok but if I hold one finger on the display and just momentarily tap another finger to the display it seems that it doesn't register it right away.
Can anyone confirm my findings?

I did the same thing as you and I got similar results.
I think I noticed this a little bit when playing shadowgun and it would not shoot right away when moving around. But other than that it hasn't affected any other apps that I've really noticed.

I have noticed the input lag in some other games and apps though. I never noticed it under HC.
Just did another test in Input Benchmark. I constantly got 80Hz refresh rate under HC but now under ICS the value is flickering around 69-75Hz. And if I suddenly add another finger the value jumps up to around 2********Hz... just as if the readings from the digitizer would be messed up.
There is something strange about ICS for sure.

Yeah it does sound like it. I never thought to run any tests between the two since it never affected my experience. But as for refresh rate, or GPU performance, I notice sometimes the screen will flicker when doing certain actions like when opening the multi-task window or any window that 'hovers' above the current screen.

[Q] Governor app that can set profile for "text input active"?

Is there any speed-governor app for the Xoom that can be configured to lock the CPU to 1000MHz whenever the soft input area is active (or better yet, whenever Graffiti input is active), and/or a way to increase the digitizer sample rate?
Historically, Graffiti has been totally unusable on my Xoom. Literally, so low of a sample rate, and so many errors, that I just couldn't use it. I finally got around to unlocking and reflashing my Xoom to CM10 last night, and locking the CPU to 1000MHz makes it work a lot better... but the accuracy is still a cruel joke compared to even my creaky, old Hero overclocked to 711MHz.
It's pretty sad, actually. On the Hero, the digitizer seems to be reporting samples at least 4-16 times as often, and I can get nearly 100% accuracy without even trying. On the Xoom locked to max speed, it seems to do a tiny bit better than my S3 gets with stock, but the sample rate still appears to be absurdly low compared to what it was on the Hero, and feedback seems to lag the actual touch by at least 100-200ms. On the Hero, feedback was literally instant... stroke, and see the pixels turn white INSTANTLY under my fingertip. On the Xoom (locked to max), they start turning white a fraction of a second after I touch the screen, and I can see the last bit of the stroke render a fraction of a second after I lift my finger away. With the stock Xoom rom, it was more like, "draw the character, and see a jagged impression of it sputter into existence about a half-second later... maybe, MAYBE even getting recognized correctly about 70% of the time".
I'm guessing that either the Xoom's digitizer has a limited sample rate, or something in the kernel or driver is limiting the sample rate... but I'm still trying to find a straight answer somewhere about whether/how you can build a custom kernel without losing your ability to run paid Market apps. Or whether it's even necessary to go to that extreme, as opposed to something like a setting that tells Android to increase the sample rate, or not throttle the CPU when an input area is active, or maybe a way to let something like SetCPU identify "soft input area active" as a profile-triggering condition. I'm also pretty sure that the Xoom's kernel (if not recent versions of Android itself) try to treat the existence of a soft input area as an excuse to massively throttle the CPU, on the theory that it's just displaying a picture of a keyboard and waiting for a blunt press. HOWEVER, I'm SURE there HAS to be an equally-official way of defeating that behavior, if only because it would also screw up Android's ability to handle east Asian input methods.

(MOD) make touch more responsive

Dear guys and gals,
Found a key for touch prediction that when edited showed a marked improvement in keyboard responsiveness and small item manipulation ie classic desktop, file explorer, etc.
The key is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TouchPrediction
Edit key for latency from 8 to 2.
Edit sample time from 8 to 2
Restart
See attached for a edited registry key to inject. Tested on two surfaces with no ill effects.
edit: to answer a few questions: this increases performance on all touch aspects of the device

The most likely ill effect would be a decrease in battery life as the system must poll the touchscreen more often... just be aware. Otherwise, cool find.

Keyboard does seem faster... Does this also affect swiping? it seems like I can swipe in any way and get the full length of the page / app in one swipe?

Haven't noted in marked increase in battery consumption but I will monitor.

Could this improve the home key button, when my surface is on standby it takes about 6 taps to get the surface to wake up.

possibly, I have not tested the mod for that per say,
Dane Reynolds said:
Could this improve the home key button, when my surface is on standby it takes about 6 taps to get the surface to wake up.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

I also have not noticed an increase in battery usage on my asus vivo tab. Not a surface, but rt.

What would decreasing the values to 1 due? I am assuming the lower the value, the better. Or did it not test well on Surface?

Originally I choose 2 to test the battery draw. However, now that I haven't seen any significant increase in battery usage the drop to 1 can be done.
Dadstar said:
What would decreasing the values to 1 due? I am assuming the lower the value, the better. Or did it not test well on Surface?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Is it that easy for all the values? In other words, can all of the registry values be set to 1 to improve performance? Or are all the values a certain number for a reason? Cuz if latency of 1 works better than the original 8, idk why Microsoft would put it at 8 in the first place. Sorry for all the questions. This stuff is interesting to me!

First off all any values are "safe values". Some screens might be of worse quality then others (different manufacturers of parts). Having that value setup to happy medium means all screens act the same. You lower the value you demand that screen reads the inputs faster and more often. Might not be a good idea on some devices.
Not only talking about surface. Remember win8 (especially pro) will go on many different devices.
Also if you set sampling and refresh to low it might start having ghost touches from minimum input that would normally not be visible (oversensitive).
Best to practice and find perfect for you and your device.

ruscik said:
First off all any values are "safe values". Some screens might be of worse quality then others (different manufacturers of parts). Having that value setup to happy medium means all screens act the same. You lower the value you demand that screen reads the inputs faster and more often. Might not be a good idea on some devices.
Not only talking about surface. Remember win8 (especially pro) will go on many different devices.
Also if you set sampling and refresh to low it might start having ghost touches from minimum input that would normally not be visible (oversensitive).
Best to practice and find perfect for you and your device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How about the other regs that don't really have a highest/lowest rate? For example, Disable Hotmail is defaulted at 2. What would changing that to 1 do?

Dadstar said:
How about the other regs that don't really have a highest/lowest rate? For example, Disable Hotmail is defaulted at 2. What would changing that to 1 do?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No there is no general rule where lower value is better. Some of the values displayed are "face values" where 2 is 2 like refresh 2 times a second. Some times 2 and 1 have a meaning off or on (like your hotmail). Remember PC reads numbers. Even more sometimes numbers, text or mix you see like 8 or 4 are actually representations of some kind of code for example hex or binary.
If you do not know what the number represents then changing it is a guess and nothing more. Just have a backup copy as fiddling in registry with drivers can have funny side effects. I did make my hd7 think i am touching it everywhere all the time so it hang seconds after boot

Are we sure this does anything at all? In order to test if the differences were psychological, I set the number to a ridiculously high value and it didn't seem to behave any differently.

Yup I found noticeable differences in fine touch control including in the registry,window control, etc.
Wupideedoo said:
Are we sure this does anything at all? In order to test if the differences were psychological, I set the number to a ridiculously high value and it didn't seem to behave any differently.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Thanks a lot!

Is 2 a good value in the case of the surface PRO 1 ?

"touch prediction" did prediction, not pooling!
"Latency" = how much milisecond to look ahead
"SampleTime" = the period in milisecond to average your finger's motion
The effect is thus:
Larger "latency" make the pointer overshoot, smaller "latency" make the pointer lag behind (1 - 100 milisecond depending on your system performance).
There's no penalty on your tablet's battery or digitizer's life for turning TouchPrediction off, and you don't need to restart to see the effect. (try finger drawing in MS Paint to see effect)
If your Surface missed touch, then try to cool the back of your tablet. It might be thermal throttling.

Input lag and possible fix (works for me).

I don't know if anybody else here has suffered this, but I've read several times when googling, that many XZP devices came with input lag out of the box. My device has always suffered with this, and flashing custom ROMs didn't seem to make a difference.
Input lag means that sometimes, keystrokes/touches are completely missed and sometimes scrolling misses too.
I unlocked my bootloader really early on, so I never wanted to send it back as I'm sure this voids my warranty.
I tested for a faulty digitizer using various screen input test apps from playstore, and they usually don't show any areas of the screen as faulty. This has always made me believe that it was most probably a software issue.
Today I discovered that yes indeed, my issue is definitely a software issue.
THE FIX:
Changing the screen resolution to 4k (3840x2160), and DPI to 821.
I've tried this before but never noted the difference in touch input. Perhaps because I wasn't looking for it.
Today I tried it again and much to my surprise, this time I noticed a HUGE improvement to input sensitivity and for now has 100% alleviated the problem. Typing, tapping and scrolling works perfect now.
This is most likely caused by the screen having to rescale pixels from 1080p to 2160p, making extra work for the CPU, but I'm no expert so I might be wrong. But it works for me.
I'll also note that I'm using Turbo ROM p75B now, and the input delay was still there until changing the resolution.
I'd like it if somebody who has suffered the same issue could provide feedback, I really hope this helps you too, as this was the only real issue that have me buyers regret, and it now works wonderfully.
Cheers.
Edit: I do believe this topic might be better recognised in the guides and discussions category. If so, could a mod please move it there.

Luckily I haven't had this input lag issue. However, I do get input lag if I have stamina mode turned on, and set to battery time preferred.
Just so you know, you do know that you're only emulating 4k, right? The only way to set the display to 4k is on AOSP.

@iKlutz I can't seem to find the resolution settings lol

Yes I understand that it's only "emulating" 4k and that it's not native 4k. It also uses more battery, which would suggest higher CPU usage, which in part contradicts my theory about rescaling causing input lag.
Perhaps it is something to do with the "touch map" (I can't think of the term), the software/grid that maps out the touchable area to the digitizer, having to resize from 1080p to 2160p, making the grid inaccurate? But it wouldn't make sense as to why it only affects some devices.
Also, I do not have stamina mode enabled as it's almost pointless in today's phones. I believe limiting processing speed only makes process queus take longer to finish, which means that CPU takes longer to idle. It only saves a negligible amount of battery unless your phone screen is off for 80% of the day. Almost as pointless as closing applications and cleaning RAM, as your phone will just use more battery rebuilding caches and restarting processes.

In any case this has completely alleviated the issue for me, so I hope someone on Google ends up here and this may be a solution for them too.

gavster26 said:
@iKlutz I can't seem to find the resolution settings lol
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There are some threads here that explain various methods to change the VM resolution and scaling. If you're unfamiliar with ADB, I suggest you read very carefully and take precautions, as setting the resolution wrong could make it really difficult to reverse the procedure and we currently don't have a way to make TWRP backups.

i noticed this too.. but i enabled glove mode and things sorted by it self..

this kinda works, it happens very much less frequently but it does still happen