Here's what I've found related to slow scrolling jitter and the touchscreen. When you first open an app, the very first couple slow scrolling swipes produce very smooth screen animation. It will then get jittery but if you exit the app, then reopen, the smoothness will return. Do this experiment in Contacts app to see what I mean.
Now I found this app called "Touch MultiTest" which reads out the touchscreen sample rate as you move your finger on the screen. When you first open it and do a swipe, you see smooth tracking and a solid sample rate reported greater than 120 Hz. However after a couple swipes the dot response becomes jittery and sample rate drops to something around 100 Hz. Closing and reopening the app gets you back to 120 Hz.
So I think this proves the hardware and software touch loop can produce smooth motion, and it's really sampling at 120 Hz. The big question is what exactly degrades after a couple swipes. In the best case it's some driver or software buffer / interrupt handling that degrades. In the worst case it's related to low level hardware issues. I'm hopeful it's software related. By the way somehow Chrome browser always scrolls smoothly with slow swipes. What is Chrome doing differently than all other apps? Just filtering?
Scrappy1 said:
Here's what I've found related to slow scrolling jitter and the touchscreen. When you first open an app, the very first couple slow scrolling swipes produce very smooth screen animation. It will then get jittery but if you exit the app, then reopen, the smoothness will return. Do this experiment in Contacts app to see what I mean.
Now I found this app called "Touch MultiTest" which reads out the touchscreen sample rate as you move your finger on the screen. When you first open it and do a swipe, you see smooth tracking and a solid sample rate reported greater than 120 Hz. However after a couple swipes the dot response becomes jittery and sample rate drops to something around 100 Hz. Closing and reopening the app gets you back to 120 Hz.
So I think this proves the hardware and software touch loop can produce smooth motion, and it's really sampling at 120 Hz. The big question is what exactly degrades after a couple swipes. In the best case it's some driver or software buffer / interrupt handling that degrades. In the worst case it's related to low level hardware issues. I'm hopeful it's software related. By the way somehow Chrome browser always scrolls smoothly with slow swipes. What is Chrome doing differently than all other apps? Just filtering?
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Have you tried contacting Essential or possibly using their beta feedback form to tell them about your theory/findings?
Our screens sample at 60Hz. We already know this from the AMA's on Reddit. The test app you're using is inaccurate if it reads 120Hz or even 100Hz.
60Hz sampling in of itself shouldn't be a problem either since iPhones (except for the newest ones) sample at 60Hz and everyone knows how smooth they are.
Hopefully there's not some other hardware flaw and it's just Essential's software.
ChronoReverse said:
Our screens sample at 60Hz. We already know this from the AMA's on Reddit. The test app you're using is inaccurate if it reads 120Hz or even 100Hz.
60Hz sampling in of itself shouldn't be a problem either since iPhones (except for the newest ones) sample at 60Hz and everyone knows how smooth they are.
Hopefully there's not some other hardware flaw and it's just Essential's software.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't put much stock in the AMA response since its so vague and nonspecific and could be referring to screen refresh rate (60 Hz) either intentionally or accidentally.
If new iPads and iPhones sample at 120 Hz, it's entirely possible essential panel is sampling at 120 Hz.
Try using Touchscreen Benchmark to test and you'll be able to verify the actual samples per second. As a point of comparison, the Galaxy S4 samples at 90Hz and the Shield tablet does a whopping 180Hz!
In any case, it's easy to see that it's not refreshing at 100Hz or 120Hz simply by looking at the number of touch samples that actually appear on the screen. Try it on a faster phone and you can see the higher density of touch responses.
Furthermore, you can't reliably discern the sample rate in the first second so trusting the app saying it's 120Hz and dips to 100Hz is even less reliable than the AMA.
ChronoReverse said:
Try using Touchscreen Benchmark to test and you'll be able to verify the actual samples per second. As a point of comparison, the Galaxy S4 samples at 90Hz and the Shield tablet does a whopping 180Hz!
In any case, it's easy to see that it's not refreshing at 100Hz or 120Hz simply by looking at the number of touch samples that actually appear on the screen. Try it on a faster phone and you can see the higher density of touch responses.
Furthermore, you can't reliably discern the sample rate in the first second so trusting the app saying it's 120Hz and dips to 100Hz is even less reliable than the AMA.
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Click to collapse
I invite anyone to do my test and decide for themselves or measure and produce new data. That's what I'm going for here. Not regurgitation of bland statements.
Scrappy1 said:
I invite anyone to do my test and decide for themselves or measure and produce new data. That's what I'm going for here. Not regurgitation of bland statements.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just invited you to use a different test instead of relying on one that doesn't spit out reasonable numbers.
Does it make more sense that the Essential potentially is using a 120Hz touchscreen which Essential won't confirm despite it being a feather in their caps (since even iPhones only got 120Hz recently) or does it make more sense that Essential is using a slower than average (for Android) panel which their software isn't filtering out as well as Apple's software does? Which is more likely to cause jitter and touch latency?
ChronoReverse said:
I just invited you to use a different test instead of relying on one that doesn't spit out reasonable numbers.
Does it make more sense that the Essential potentially is using a 120Hz touchscreen which Essential won't confirm despite it being a feather in their caps (since even iPhones only got 120Hz recently) or does it make more sense that Essential is using a slower than average (for Android) panel which their software isn't filtering out as well as Apple's software does? Which is more likely to cause jitter and touch latency?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's actually that your misunderstanding terminology...
Your mistaking sample rate and refresh rate...
Refresh rate is how many times per second? the screen is redrawn...
Sample rate is how many times per second? the screen reads touches...
No way you can tell the difference between 120hz vs 100hz.
Sent from my PH-1 using Tapatalk
rignfool said:
It's actually that your misunderstanding terminology...
Your mistaking sample rate and refresh rate...
Refresh rate is how many times per second? the screen is redrawn...
Sample rate is how many times per second? the screen reads touches...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, I'm referring to the touchscreen. Obviously the Essential LCD only refreshes at 60Hz (only the Razer and iPad Pro refreshes at 120Hz) but the touchscreen also samples at 60Hz which is common for lower end Androids (90Hz and 120Hz are the other common sampling rates found in Android devices).
The new iPhone X's OLED still refreshes at 60Hz but has a 120Hz sampling touchscreen which is higher than the 60Hz it used to be in other iOS devices (except for the iPad Pro). I also mentioned the Shield tablet sampling at 180Hz and there's no mobile device with a screen refresh that fast either.
LNJ said:
No way you can tell the difference between 120hz vs 100hz.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The drop to 100 Hz after a couple of seconds is "indicative of the problem", not that a 100 Hz rate would not be smooth in a properly designed device. Something comes unhinged at the point we see the drop to 100 Hz. Could be touch buffer / event que is not being serviced fast enough due to low level driver or hardware. Also could be some piece of software in critical path starts consuming more time than allowed, leading to non uniform response. Could be actual stuttering of hardware.
When you exit and then restart an app, the touch event pipleline is flushed, so things are fixed again for a couple of seconds.
YouTube app
Scrappy1 said:
Here's what I've found related to slow scrolling jitter and the touchscreen. When you first open an app, the very first couple slow scrolling swipes produce very smooth screen animation. It will then get jittery but if you exit the app, then reopen, the smoothness will return. Do this experiment in Contacts app to see what I mean.
Now I found this app called "Touch MultiTest" which reads out the touchscreen sample rate as you move your finger on the screen. When you first open it and do a swipe, you see smooth tracking and a solid sample rate reported greater than 120 Hz. However after a couple swipes the dot response becomes jittery and sample rate drops to something around 100 Hz. Closing and reopening the app gets you back to 120 Hz.
So I think this proves the hardware and software touch loop can produce smooth motion, and it's really sampling at 120 Hz. The big question is what exactly degrades after a couple swipes. In the best case it's some driver or software buffer / interrupt handling that degrades. In the worst case it's related to low level hardware issues. I'm hopeful it's software related. By the way somehow Chrome browser always scrolls smoothly with slow swipes. What is Chrome doing differently than all other apps? Just filtering?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have noticed that if you launch the camera and then open the YouTube app or whatever you're using where you can see the touch scrolling jitters, the touch scrolling is nice and smooth. Then after some time it comes back. The touch scrolling in Chrome is perfect and I wish it was the same everywhere. For some reason the YouTube app performs the worst for me. Chrome must have received an update a while back since I used to get bad touch scrolling on that too. The thing that worries me is some claim touch scrolling is perfectly smooth on their device. Hopefully that's a case of them not noticing it and not a case of actual hardware differences.
mhajii210 said:
I have noticed that if you launch the camera and then open the YouTube app or whatever you're using where you can see the touch scrolling jitters, the touch scrolling is nice and smooth. Then after some time it comes back. The touch scrolling in Chrome is perfect and I wish it was the same everywhere. For some reason the YouTube app performs the worst for me. Chrome must have received an update a while back since I used to get bad touch scrolling on that too. The thing that worries me is some claim touch scrolling is perfectly smooth on their device. Hopefully that's a case of them not noticing it and not a case of actual hardware differences.
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Click to collapse
Cool tip! I hadn't noticed that. Opening camera then switching to contacts had me scrolling smooth for many minutes. However after a few rounds of tests it lost the magic. I could no longer use camera open first to produce the smooth scrolling. So there are several factors at play here and this could use more investigation. Most of all though this gives me hope the issue can be totally fixed in software.
I'm starting to think the thing that goes bad and causes choppiness is the rendering pipeline. I enabled "Profile GPU Rendering" and then did a screen capture after scrolling my battery stats in settings for both 1) good condition just after launching settings when scrolling is smooth and 2) bad condition that kicks in after a few seconds when things get choppy. The bad condition shows vastly inflated rendering time which blows the 60 FPS (green line) budget. The largest increase is in red (command issue), but EVERYTHING is inflated in the bad condition. What could cause this?
The captures of the good and bad conditions are attached.
Turns out the reason the rendering pipeline starts taking so long is due to the application thread moving from high performance CPU cluster to the low performance CPU cluster. Using the paid version of System Monitor I opened a floating window of CPU load and freq. I then again opened battery settings and scrolled around in the good and bad state. I can see the CPU load is on the high performance cluster right away (5-8) and those guys are running at 2.4 GHz. Hence everything is smooth. When the jitters set in, the load has moved to low performance cluster (1-4) and they are running much lower clock rate < 1 GHz. I do believe this is probably fairly normal android behavior, but it's obviously tied to the slow scrolling jitters for us. It could be a subtle governor or big.LITTLE thread scheduling issue somehow playing into touch screen weirdness I suppose.
The two captures attached show the issue. One was captured right after launching battery settings when things are smooth and CPUs 5-8 are screaming. Other was captured after things went jittery, and here you can see CPU load that was on 5-8 has moved to 1-4, and clock frequency is much lower. (Hovers between 300 - 1000 Mhz)
Scrappy1 said:
Turns out the reason the rendering pipeline starts taking so long is due to the application thread moving from high performance CPU cluster to the low performance CPU cluster. Using the paid version of System Monitor I opened a floating window of CPU load and freq. I then again opened battery settings and scrolled around in the good and bad state. I can see the CPU load is on the high performance cluster right away (5-8) and those guys are running at 2.4 GHz. Hence everything is smooth. When the jitters set in, the load has moved to low performance cluster (1-4) and they are running much lower clock rate < 1 GHz. I do believe this is probably fairly normal android behavior, but it's obviously tied to the slow scrolling jitters for us. It could be a subtle governor or big.LITTLE thread scheduling issue somehow playing into touch screen weirdness I suppose.
The two captures attached show the issue. One was captured right after launching battery settings when things are smooth and CPUs 5-8 are screaming. Other was captured after things went jittery, and here you can see CPU load that was on 5-8 has moved to 1-4, and clock frequency is much lower. (Hovers between 300 - 1000 Mhz)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Let's try this
@DespairFactor
GPU governor
rignfool said:
Let's try this
@DespairFactor
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well I can tell you it's not all because of the CPU performance since setting GPU governor to performance on Oreo beta 2 completely gets rid of the touch screen jitters for me. I'm running Oreo beta 2, Rey.R3 Kernel and Magisk 15.2. Using EX Kernel Manager to set GPU governor to performance, I have eliminated the touch scrolling microstutters. Try it out for yourself and see! I also set CPU governor to conservative to compensate for the slightly increased battery usage. Phone is blazing now. https://forum.xda-developers.com/essential-phone/development/kernel-rey-kernel-t3723601 is the link to the kernel.
mhajii210 said:
Well I can tell you it's not all because of the CPU performance since setting GPU governor to performance on Oreo beta 2 completely gets rid of the touch screen jitters for me. I'm running Oreo beta 2, Rey.R3 Kernel and Magisk 15.2. Using EX Kernel Manager to set GPU governor to performance, I have eliminated the touch scrolling microstutters. Try it out for yourself and see! I also set CPU governor to conservative to compensate for the slightly increased battery usage. Phone is blazing now. https://forum.xda-developers.com/essential-phone/development/kernel-rey-kernel-t3723601 is the link to the kernel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for your input! I would go down the root and tweaks path if I didn't have to use my phone for work with the Google device policy and all. Hoping for some jitter improvement in next official stock update.
rignfool said:
Let's try this
@DespairFactor
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think we can move the touchscreen to it's own workqueue, but not sure if it'll handle this.
mhajii210 said:
Well I can tell you it's not all because of the CPU performance since setting GPU governor to performance on Oreo beta 2 completely gets rid of the touch screen jitters for me. I'm running Oreo beta 2, Rey.R3 Kernel and Magisk 15.2. Using EX Kernel Manager to set GPU governor to performance, I have eliminated the touch scrolling microstutters. Try it out for yourself and see! I also set CPU governor to conservative to compensate for the slightly increased battery usage. Phone is blazing now. https://forum.xda-developers.com/essential-phone/development/kernel-rey-kernel-t3723601 is the link to the kernel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Post a video. In all likelihood, it's just placebo effect. I've heard time and time again people claiming that that the slow-scrolling stutter is gone. It's never once been proven. Here's a side-by-side comparison vs the Pixel XL.
I've noticed the display on my OnePlus 9 flickers slightly as the display refresh rate adjusts from 60hz to 120hz and vice versa. Turning high 120 refresh rate off prevents the issue. It is more noticeable with dark mode activated.
Furtheremore they are color difference in screen like this video of exemple :
https://imgur.com/U5ZWAvV
This is so annoying !
Don't know if that's normal or not, but all the variable rate displays have more glitches than their fixed rate display AMOLED counerparts in general.
Your phone is one of the best variable rate displays out there.
Try a hard reboot, clear system cache and also try in safe mode to rule out a 3rd party app bug.
Disable all power management... destroyer of worlds. Developer options>standby apps, all buckets should show as active otherwise power management is active.
Factory reset, last resort.
It may be a firmware bug present in all. Lastly it could be hardware especially if not many others are seeing this behavior.
That kind of glitch would drive me nuts. Poorer color rendering on the new variable rate Samsung's as well as almost all of the other brands is one reason I bought a second new Note 10+. I'll eat the 60hz notchiness for peace of mind.
Factory setup/calibration of the variable rate displays is extremely difficult and not perfected as of yet. As I said your phone should be one of the best variable rate displays... be glad it's not one of the others.
That's a OnePlus 9? Center hole punch? Hmmm. With smooth display option from 60-90hz? Never seen that model.......
avid_droid said:
That's a OnePlus 9? Center hole punch? Hmmm. With smooth display option from 60-90hz? Never seen that model.......
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's a sample video to show what my 9 does.
AndroidsKings said:
That's a sample video to show what my 9 does.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh hahaha.
blackhawk said:
Don't know if that's normal or not, but all the variable rate displays have more glitches than their fixed rate display AMOLED counerparts in general.
Your phone is one of the best variable rate displays out there.
Try a hard reboot, clear system cache and also try in safe mode to rule out a 3rd party app bug.
Disable all power management... destroyer of worlds. Developer options>standby apps, all buckets should show as active otherwise power management is active.
Factory reset, last resort.
It may be a firmware bug present in all. Lastly it could be hardware especially if not many others are seeing this behavior.
That kind of glitch would drive me nuts. Poorer color rendering on the new variable rate Samsung's as well as almost all of the other brands is one reason I bought a second new Note 10+. I'll eat the 60hz notchiness for peace of mind.
Factory setup/calibration of the variable rate displays is extremely difficult and not perfected as of yet. As I said your phone should be one of the best variable rate displays... be glad it's not one of the others.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks
WHAT IS REFRESH RATE?
The number of times the screen refreshes its image each second is measured as the refresh rate. It is determined in Hertz (Hz). Most entry-level smartphones have a 60Hz refresh rate, whereas mid-range smartphones have a 90Hz or 120Hz refresh rate, and premium smartphones have a 120Hz, 144Hz or 165Hz refresh rate. Although most phone brands are introducing adaptive refresh rate it's a brand new feature for smartphones — a device display with an adaptive refresh rate is able to change the refresh rate to match your actions on the screen depending on the range of the Refresh rate e.g a device with 120hz will adaptively switch between 60 - 120Hz. While the frequency at which the display on your phone interprets your input is known as the touch sampling rate (also known as the response rate). In other words, it refers to the quantity of times your touch is registered by the display. The display becomes more sensitive the faster the touch sampling rate is.
By minimising gaps in its interpretation of your touch input, the screen can respond more precisely and provide a smoother experience. Since a delay of a few milliseconds might occasionally mean the difference between winning and losing, this is very helpful for mobile gaming. The Redmagic 7 Series(960Hz), IQOO Neo5 & Realme GT Neo3 150W and other smartphones have the highest touch sampling rate available at the moment, which is 1000Hz. To explain better; Refresh rate refers to how quickly the screen displays the shifting pixels, whereas touch sampling rate refers to how quickly the screen reads your input. The former deals with sensitivity, whereas the latter deals with motion simulation. The animations on the screen seem more fluidly as the refresh rate increases.
A smartphone with 90 Hz refresh rate and 240 - 300 Hz touch sampling rate, in my opinion, is ideal for an all-around experience.
WHAT IS FPS?
Most of the time, people mistake FPS for refresh rate. The quantity of frames displayed on your screen each second is measured in FPS (FRAMES PER SECOND). This always relates to everything you do while watching a movie or playing a game on your screen.
WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT?
Refresh rate and FPS must be high for a fluid performance when used for gaming. This is due to the visual experience being confined to the weakest connection in the end. The refresh rate of the display must at least match the highest FPS that the GPU is capable of producing in order to operate at peak efficiency. As a consequence, there won't be any delays, clutter, or motion blur during the performance.
Hello,
I have flashed a custom ROM (LineageOS) for my Motorola Edge 20 Pro phone. The only feature I miss from stock is the ability to set refresh rate for games to 120 or 140hz sometimes, otherwise I like my phone to be at 60hz for power savings. I turn off all animations anyway.
I tried to flash the Moto games apk which did this but sadly I get an error: "Package com.motorola.gamemode requires unavailable shared library moto-core_services; failing!"
I had a look on the play store and I couldn't find much. What options do I have if any?
Thank you
AFAIK a screen's refresh rate ( measured in Hz ) typically is fixed, unless device has a variable refresh rate ( VRR ) feature, e.g. 60-144 Hz.
With the moto app when games are detected it would up the refresh rate automatically.
I can set it to 120hz which is semi variable, if the screen brightness is high enough, but I don't really want 120hz etc for anything apart from games, I'd rather take the extra battery life!
Hello, I recently discovered the SetEdit app. I didn't use it yet because I'm trying to understand how it works first, what permission needs and what values can be added/modified and which can't.
Seeing some videos and reading the few things I could find about it online I started wondering if it was possible to add to this phone the option to lower the refresh rate when displaying a static image like most phones with high refresh rate displays can.
I know the Edge 30 Pro switches to 48Hz while viewing the AOD. So ideally I would set it to lower the refresh rate to 48Hz when viewing static content and pick back up once I touch the display.
Do you know if there's a line I could add that might make it work? Do I need to do any further modifications to the phone to modify the "system table"?
I'm still on Android 12 on the device and it's mostly an AOSP ROM with some additions, nothing too crazy.
I would've post this on the main forum for the phone, but it's pretty much dead and, for now, it's basically just me constantly posting about the issues with the Android 13 update I gather from other parts of the internet.
Thanks!
Have you tried the Galaxy MaxHz app? Although it's mainly designed for Samsung phones, it also works on the 30 Pro. You can adjust it so that the screen refreshes as low as 48hz when you're not using it. Worst part is that you have to pay for premium go have everything enabled, but it's less than 2 bucks and it's completely worth it imo. It works on Android 13, too.