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Touchscreen sample rate and jitter findings

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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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?
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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
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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.

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

Refresh Rate lag

Hi all, wondered if you could shed some light on this situation, I'm not sure if it's my device UK or a software issue. So when I select 120hz some apps are not silky smooth when scrolling like YouTube for example, it's not true 120hz it's as though it's on auto adjust, but it isn't, home screen and some apps are 120hz but some apps aren't is this a app issue or a phone issue? Has anyone else experienced this?

Not all applications support 120hz, Google Maps comes to mind, pretty sure that's capped at 60hz, I remember reading a article about YouTube not supporting 90hz on OnePlus devices, maybe the YouTube application is also called out at 60hz, I'd confidently say it's probably the app rather than the phone

Mat2k2020 said:
Hi all, wondered if you could shed some light on this situation, I'm not sure if it's my device UK or a software issue. So when I select 120hz some apps are not silky smooth when scrolling like YouTube for example, it's not true 120hz it's as though it's on auto adjust, but it isn't, home screen and some apps are 120hz but some apps aren't is this a app issue or a phone issue? Has anyone else experienced this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Its app specific, some apps have no caps some do

I have this issue too.
It seems like whenever a video is playing in whatever app, it will switch to 60Hz.
In Reddit for example, scrolling is very laggy.

If your refresh rate mode is set to auto, ColorOS decides what refresh rate to run on based on a list found at /system/etc/refresh_rate_config.xml
If you set the refresh rate mode to 120Hz, though, it should run at that refresh rate in most apps.

Jordytjes said:
I have this issue too.
It seems like whenever a video is playing in whatever app, it will switch to 60Hz.
In Reddit for example, scrolling is very laggy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same here, is pretty annoying because takes away all the smoothness feeling, although sometimes it doesn't happen and keeps working at 120hz, so random... Just wondering did you find anyway to avoid this to happen?

Android 12 - refresh rate is broken, 90hz all the time

I just noticed that my Pixel 4 XL (currently has the newest Android 12/November patch) does not cycle between 60 and 90 hz anymore. I just noticed an unexpectated and new drain on the battery and finally found the culprit.
Yes, I checked developer options, the phone is NOT forcing 90hz. I checked with developer options (show refresh rate) and the phone is constantly, meaning 100% using 90hz, it never changes to 60. No matter what I do - Youtube, phone, scrolling, doing nothing, idling, homescreen, newspaper app, Audible - it matters not. It is constantly forcing 90hz WITHOUT having ever clicked the 90hz force toggle. This is putting a drain on the battery that is just unacceptable.
Can you guys confirm this?

Try clearing the system cache.
A factory reset maybe be needed after a major OTA firmware upgrade but there's no guarantee it will resolve it.
Updates tend to break things...

blackhawk said:
Try clearing the system cache.
A factory reset maybe be needed after a major OTA firmware upgrade but there's no guarantee it will resolve it.
Updates tend to break things...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The phone was - actually - already factor reset. After doing the Android 12 update, I factory reset it and gave it to a family member, that one set it up new. So it's not a "remnant" of Android 11.

Morgrain said:
The phone was - actually - already factor reset. After doing the Android 12 update, I factory reset it and gave it to a family member, that one set it up new. So it's not a "remnant" of Android 11.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would re-flash with the latest full image, leaving the script intact (allowing the data partition to be wiped). This may be inconvenient but it's the only way you will know if there is a hardware issue with the phone. I'd also like to know what led you to the refresh rate. In other words, what made you look there. The stock battery monitor is not very good and even looking at system apps (screen, ambient display) you only get time and a percentage of the battery.

is the same on 12 and 11, i just installed 11 and is always 90hz

yes i can confirm, i had the same issue and i just boght my pixel 4 xl 10 days ago. updated to android 13 beta now and it still has the same problem. really weird but i think that google just decided that its best for google pixel 4 owners to have 90hz all the time now cause u know its "more common" now

Google changed how Smooth display works during the cycle of the phone. IIRC it was the same on A11 too. Basically the only time it goes 60hz is during battery saving mode & in some specific apps that prohibit it. It also disables it when HBM is on.

That doesn't make a lot of sense, you can save much more energy by just raising to 90hz for touch and animations and otherwise reduce to 60hz independently of the battery state.
I had the pixel 7 Pro for a while and can confirm that it works there as expected (60 for static content & no touch events, otherwise raises up to 120hz), just not for the pixel 4 XL.
This does seem like a bug to me and explains why battery life (SOT) got so much worse. I wonder if it's an intended degradation to get people to upgrade..

Fix it with adb, set minimal refresh rate
adb shell settings put system min_refresh_rate 1.0
adb shell settings put system peak_refresh_rate 90.0

Tested that, does not work either unfortunately. Display stays on 90Hz all the time

onemandivision said:
Tested that, does not work either unfortunately. Display stays on 90Hz all the time
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Confirm you have extra dim disabled, and brightness 60%

Confirmed, does not make a difference

Out of nowhere it started working. The only thing I changed in between is brightness and extra dim, ending up with the same setting as before (full brightness, extra dim disabled). Didn't work straight away, but after leaving the phone for 5 minutes and picking it up again, I immediately noticed (display refresh rate setting was still enabled)
Thank you for your help, Hamid!

onemandivision said:
Out of nowhere it started working. The only thing I changed in between is brightness and extra dim, ending up with the same setting as before (full brightness, extra dim disabled). Didn't work straight away, but after leaving the phone for 5 minutes and picking it up again, I immediately noticed (display refresh rate setting was still enabled)
Thank you for your help, Hamid!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No problem, glad i helped!
Feel free to visit my optimization threads, it might help improve your battery life and performance.

One last remark: It didn't really work well at first, at least not as consistently as on the pixel 7 that I've tried. After some trial and error, playing around with various settings, the culprit seems to have the "increase touchscreen sensitivity" setting that I had enabled. Since turning it off, the switching between 60 and 90Hz is much better. Brightness and extra dim don't seem to play a role.
Battery life also seems to have improved a lot (now at ~50% at the end of the day compared to <20% before)

How To Guide Significantly reduce UI lag on One UI

After going through all the settings and unsuccessfully following general guides on here, I finally narrowed down five things that significantly reduced the lag on this phone. (As in... I actually enjoy using the phone now.) Thought I'd share them here.
1: Install and default Nova launcher. Clear memory of One UI home app
2: Replace stock keyboard with google keyboard. Adjust the vibrations so that they feel good. (41 worked for me)
3: Turn off "Put unused apps to sleep" in [Battery and device care > battery > power saving]
4: Turn off "Adaptive battery" in [Battery and device care > battery > more battery settings]
5: Disable "Edge panels" under display options.
That's it!
Optional: Enable dev options and set the first two animation speeds to 0.5

Nova launcher was never faster then One UI, unless Samsung managed to screw that up too.
A lot of fail coming out of Samsung lately.
Adaptive battery, etc never worked.
Optimized power setting is probably a better more well rounded setting selection.
After turning off the global power junk you need to track down the power hogs and deal with each on a case by case basis for optimum optimization.

I'm not sure about the adaptive battery mode. A few additional things you could do is disable battery hogs like Bixby and multiple services like google and google assistant which serve no purpose. If you are rooted, you can disable them effortlessly. In my opinion, samsung apps are very well optimized for one ui. I wouldn't replace them. Instead, I will disable all the junk apps and just use the dedicated samsung apps for smooth and consistent experience.

I manually uninstalled or disabled all the garbage I possibly could that was pre-installed on my Straight Talk A53 - and there's a lot. I set the refresh rate to 60 (120 is nice to have BUT is a battery drain). I also used ADB to set virtual RAM to zero as suggested. I'd love to know more commands to get rid of **** I'll never use and will never need and can't disable: like AR, device pulse & anything else that's useless that I can safely remove from the system. The phone isn't as laggy for me as the A51 was. I'm content with it, and you've got to admit it does have a nice punchy vibrant screen. It actually runs Candy Crush smoother than my iPhone 13, and that's about as hardcore as I game.

One UI shouldn't lag at all. It's normally quit snappy at least with Android 9 and 10. Lagging is a potential sign of system instability, often the only warning you'll get before a boot loop. Try in safe mode and see how it's running. If it runs well in safe mode a 3rd party app(s) is likely gumming it up. Get rid of all social media trashware and shopping apps on the phone.
Also clear the system cache on the boot menu.
Clear app caches; SD Maid does a good job at this and deep cleaning on a stock Samsung.

The biggest one to make your phone feel faster (works with pretty much every android phone), is to enable developer settings and scrolling down to the screen animation section. There you can set the animation speeds. There are three different settings which you could change. I always put all three of them to 0.5x instead of the default 1x. This makes your phone feel way faster, because it actually performs the animations faster. The appdrawer will open up faster etc. You could give it a go. I actually swear by it. Works amazing.

JulesMarcus1234 said:
The biggest one to make your phone feel faster (works with pretty much every android phone), is to enable developer settings and scrolling down to the screen animation section. There you can set the animation speeds. There are three different settings which you could change. I always put all three of them to 0.5x instead of the default 1x. This makes your phone feel way faster, because it actually performs the animations faster. The appdrawer will open up faster etc. You could give it a go. I actually swear by it. Works amazing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Turn off all animations. See what you got.
I never use them; a waste of resources and irritating especially if the phone really is fast.

blackhawk said:
Turn off all animations. See what you got.
I never use them; a waste of resources and irritating especially if the phone really is fast.
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Click to collapse
I find it looks more polished at 0.5X. Not slow, not nothing, just right. For me The UI is just too abrupt shutting them off entirely. Personal preference.

mewcatchew said:
I find it looks more polished at 0.5X. Not slow, not nothing, just right. For me The UI is just too abrupt shutting them off entirely. Personal preference.
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Click to collapse
I've tried that but still prefer to see the raw speed.
It also helps you see any lag that indicates a problem. Best to nip anything like that in the bud. Slower phones need something to try and hide the lag, the N10+ doesn't have that issue. It's the first Note that brought some real punch to the mix.

blackhawk said:
I've tried that but still prefer to see the raw speed.
It also helps you see any lag that indicates a problem. Best to nip anything like that in the bud. Slower phones need something to try and hide the lag, the N10+ doesn't have that issue. It's the first Note that brought some real punch to the mix.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
But the Exynos 1280 isn't a slow SOC, just not optimized. It beats the SD 695G in most benchmarks, yet my Nord N20 beats the $#*t out of it. I think it needs optimizing.

mewcatchew said:
But the Exynos 1280 isn't a slow SOC, just not optimized. It beats the SD 695G in most benchmarks, yet my Nord N20 beats the $#*t out of it. I think it needs optimizing.
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A fast phone is like love, no test can tell you, you just know it's fast, through and through, to the bone
All Samsung's should be optimized. This N10+ was a hot running mess of a battery hog. Hard to believe it's the same now fast, cool running phone after I optimized it.
Optimizing them has a steep learning curve but it's easy once you think it though.
Once optimized and running well don't upgrade or update the firmware. I don't allow apps, especially Samsung apps to update... updates can and do break things. DO Not update the firmware on Buds+ etc if they sound and work well. Had a firmware update screw up my one pair. Have 2 new pairs still on factory loaded firmware that sound great, like the first pair did before the "improved" firmware. Typical Samsung bs...