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.
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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.
the title says it all, but not to leave them with later doubts, I tell you: I have installed Cyanogenmod with Android 5.1, which of course I'm going for luxury. The detail is that I currently use Kernel Adiutor for CPU / GPU settings and the extras it has. the detail is that I do adjustment after adjustment and then ... it comes to work, unfortunately I have problems with other applications and I must be making adjustments every so often. I have some settings (at the moment) so I can use it for PUBG (which gives in some cases flaws in sound and after some time the application fails completely forcing the phone lock (S3 Neo)). I must resort to the application to give a half solution that finally does that, solve the problem halfway .. Because of the "half solution" I've been doubting if the application itself runs the changes above (a placebo effect), this is because the device once in even with the minimum CPU / GPU settings the phone starts to behave slowly (as is normal) but also consumes a large amount of battery, in the afternoon watching streaming (through medium settings in the application) the battery It drops quickly, from 52% to 9% in an average time of 10 minutes, I was finding out if I changed the application for an at least more durable alternative to Kernel Adiutor (like SetCPU or similar) but I doubt that they are compatible with the version of Android that I own or, if it will also apply placebo effect, as I am beginning to notice.
And if in case of mentioning the battery, it is better not to say anything about it since it is not battery failure. It's the same one that I've always owned, plus, unlike this one, it worked better via Stock for obvious reasons.
So I disabled the game booster and game launcher, also currently trying to disable the game optimization service but can't.
The phone is experiencing a fps drop at least every 10 seconds or so when I am playing pubgm on the lowest graphic setting.
Does anyone else have this issue? CPU usage was never 100%. (and gpu usage is always below 15%) In fact, it pretty much stays around 50% all the time, so I don't really have a clue why it is having a stutter/lag every now and then.
Also, there seems to be some sort of input lag. Not sure if that is related to the issue above.
Leonnnnnn said:
So I disabled the game booster and game launcher, also currently trying to disable the game optimization service but can't.
The phone is experiencing a fps drop at least every 10 seconds or so when I am playing pubgm on the lowest graphic setting.
Does anyone else have this issue? CPU usage was never 100%. (and gpu usage is always below 15%) In fact, it pretty much stays around 50% all the time, so I don't really have a clue why it is having a stutter/lag every now and then.
Also, there seems to be some sort of input lag. Not sure if that is related to the issue above.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe other apps are running in the background. Try to close all other apps. Disable any energy saving option. Have you installed latest firmware updates?
S21 Ultra should be able to run without any lags.
Leonnnnnn said:
So I disabled the game booster and game launcher, also currently trying to disable the game optimization service but can't.
The phone is experiencing a fps drop at least every 10 seconds or so when I am playing pubgm on the lowest graphic setting.
Does anyone else have this issue? CPU usage was never 100%. (and gpu usage is always below 15%) In fact, it pretty much stays around 50% all the time, so I don't really have a clue why it is having a stutter/lag every now and then.
Also, there seems to be some sort of input lag. Not sure if that is related to the issue above.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Am having screen shutters like little earthquake while playing Pubg ..
Please let me know if there's any solution ..
I am playing some games in emulation, they are sometimes not running full speed, but only the middle cores seem to go up when needed (i use CPU float to monitor the CPU usage), while the big one always remains at ~ 800 mhz.
I am not rooted, is there a way to make the big one wake up and improve the performance of the games?
Thanks!
I found a solution (a workaround).
For anyone interested to have (much) better performance in CPU heavy games (emulators) here's how you can force the phone to mostly use the middle (2.4 ghz) cores instead of only/mostly the small ones.
Run "CPU throttling test" apk, LOCK the application and let it run in the background. In the background, the application will ONLY use the 4 small cores, and it'll constantly throttle to ~ 20%.
Now start you game/emulator (in my case Retroarch, with some HEAVY on CPU games), and if you use CPU float monitoring tool, you will notice that the small cores will be kept busy at 1.7 ghz by the CPU throttling test apk, while the medium ones will be used as needed by the game (the big one will still be left unused, or just used for a split second in some cases).
For me, the performance is 'easily' 25% better, if not more, and the battery consumption went from 1% every 4 minutes, to 1% every 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
I am using P7Pro and I am satisfied with idle drain, however screen on is using too much battery while I am scrolling, or doing some basic tasks.
In this example while recording it was using much more power than without it (it's obvious), but without recording I am seeing constant 700-1100mah spikes (also CPU spikes a lot, so that's why it is spanking the battery) while doing this generic stuff.
Settings: 45% brightness, Wi-Fi, adaptive brightness, 120Hz, 1440p, stock kernel, no root.
I think that this CPU governor sucks too much juice in order to prevent occasionally hiccups. Do you guys have the same experience? It's my 5th day of using this phone, but don't think that adaptive battery could have anything to do with it.
For me it's hard to tell if it's high.
I have tested my Poco F3 with 120Hz on a custom ROM for you to compare.
( The P7P didn't arrive yet)
I did no video recording but took two screenshots at highest (swiping) and lowest (idling) clocks.
CPU at 100% during normal usage for me too. As in, not using camera, GPS, video, etc. Just using apps, opening and closing social media.
Android always did that to make the device responsive, I guess things didn't change(must be the default scheduler) . Is it as soon as you toch your display?
Sammath said:
Android always did that to make the device responsive, I guess things didn't change(must be the default scheduler) . Is it as soon as you toch your display?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
s22U is not doing it like the Pixel is.
Turn off smooth refresh and test again.
xgerryx said:
CPU at 100% during normal usage for me too. As in, not using camera, GPS, video, etc. Just using apps, opening and closing social media.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not getting that myself, strangely. Using Simple System Monitor and root privileges, I put a CPU load overlay on the screen and performed various tasks including scrolling through settings, scrolling through social media and opening a few other apps and using them. The CPU averaged between 30%-40% load. Sometimes it would touch 50% but not often.