Maybe stupid question...but here it is.
I've read several comments about the the Asus performance settings, a high performance setting is mentioned. On my dutch ww.29 i have 3 options:
- Energy saving
- Balanced
- Normal
Is normal mode the same as high performance mode?
btw. changing to normal from balance mode doesn't make any noticeable difference....
Tegra changed the name of normal to performance recently. Probably just haven't updated it for the Dutch.
Ok, thanks.
Hi fellow Mate 7 owners. I've seen mention of stuttering here before. The phone is reasonably powerful and it intrigued me as to why it stutters, especially when scrolling. It helped to remove the Huawei launcher after setting up Smart Launcher Pro and de-bloat system apps, but I still saw some stutter so turned animations to. 5, then off altogether. My phone runs quite efficiently but that minor jerkiness bothered me. I've now enabled the "force GPU rendering" setting in developer options and re-enabled animations. It runs a lot nicer. Smooth and fast.
I'm assuming the cause was just that where possible, it tries to run on the 1.3GHz economy processor which is not fast enough for frequent screen redraws where content has to be recalculated.
So, my question to those who are tech savvy with the more complex workings of Android is, can we edit something in the system that tells the phone how to control CPU governing so that it steps up to the 1.8GHz processor easier for a smoother operation?
I don't want to install an extra governor app from Google Play.
Edit:
I've ended up installing Kernel Adiutor (needs root) so that I can alter settings and see how it's affected in case it's possible to alter the kernel permanently.
Changed a few settings with CPU governor and I/O scheduler. Kept forced GPU setting in developer options and animations at 0.5.
Edit:
Uninstalled Kernel Adiutor as I had trouble with settings not all sticking and sometimes performance suffering.
I've now installed EX Kernel Manager and two good monitoring apps by same dev. Better result so far. Settings seem to stick and the phone is more reliable. It's smoother, snappy to use. Another thing this has also benefited is stable bluetooth streaming of music. I used to get dropouts, now it's like it's connected by aux cable. This is a big thing for me as I use it on BT for music a lot. It can multitask whilst streaming music and still not drop out momentarily.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flar2.exkernelmanager&hl=en
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?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
Why I have to use governors that save power, this is not phone, and radiator on this tablet is finally made as it supposed to be (actually present now not absent duh), so throttling and heat is not there. Conditions have changed and we should use performance governor! After overclocking my desktop and knowing that i just put it on max frequency all the time knowing that it will be the best performance (though it auto changes power profile in inactivity)
I decided why didn't I do the same with the tablet.
I changed to performance governor and set tresholds up/down 10 points lower/higher in ex kernel for big cluster and everything running smoother, i didn't find any measurable battery toll, not that i would care about it. Though i can see it pulls significantly more current when reloading browser pages like 2000mAh. I automated this kernel profile change with franko kernel m., because I am not sure yet if to put it on permanently if it will causes standby drain, it shouldn't but it can. I find that it noticably faster with heavy tasks, not huge difference, but I I feel it, and higher amperage and seeing larger cores loaded more confirms it.
You can try and share how did it go. Anybody has other advices how to tune this kernel for performance.
Knowing how powerful ADB is, I was wondering if it would be possible to get a more granular control of battery saving features with ADB?? By example, I think it would be cool to limit processor speed while keeping tilt to wake gesture. Right now, battery saving mode work as an all or nothing mode. I used ADB to remove Samsung bloat and now I can comfortably make it through two days (not wearing it at night) but, it would be great to go even longer.
For now, I used developer mode to disable all animations, not sure how much of an impact it have but, it's better than nothing.
I just found this post here: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/changing-cpu-governor-with-adb.4193163/ . It was intended for use on a Note 20 phone but it still look promising. I'll try it once I get back from travelling.
Clearly, power saving mode change cpu governor, among other things, on the watch. Now, I just need to get the same governor change without all the other things.
Any luck?
One has to assume that the engineers at Samsung are doing their research and setting things up to be as reasonably efficient as possible. Overdoing it (lowering CPU too much or for too long or at the wrong time, for example) could cause unexpected issues or instability.