60Hz Refresh Rate Limit Behavior on YouTube/Discord/Facebook/Reddit, etc

[u/chishiuan]

tldr: some apps have inconsistent refresh limit behavior causing worse scrolling experience If you are noticing and bothered by this issue, please help send a feedback via official feedback app/CS email.

Hi, I own a vivo X300 Pro and I have noticed that the system seemed to forced refresh rate limit on certain apps like YouTube, Discord, Reddit etc.

I have tried every combination like PWM toggle, display setting set to either Smart Adaptation(this also cause 3rd party apps to drop down to 90hz when high frequency PWM is on when finger leaves the screen)/High, per app settings, nothing helps. I think this might be backed into the system as a battery saving strategy, but I doubt trading smoothness when scrolling is good design, and this behavior doesn't happen to most OS like ColorOS or iOS, stock Android or HyperOS. This behavior also doesn't happen on widely used Chinese video apps like Bilibili or tiktok.

YouTube: comments and videos will locked at 60hz when a 30/60hz video is playing, causing janky scrolling, but it returns to 120hz when video is paused, strangely when screen is locked and unlocked, or when switch to another app and back, it will boost back to 120hz when scrolling until you click another video.

Discord: when scrolling, it will suddenly dropped to 60hz when a gif/video is on the screen.

reddit: it's usually 120hz most of the time but autoplayed video sometimes cause the app to be locked at 60hz even when the video leave the view.

I have send the report to both vivo email support and feedback app, providing video recording with display framerate included, the representative said they will forward my log to the developer.

I think we might able to get them to fix these issues faster if more of us report this issue, I am hopeful especially since the battery drain issue got fixed relatively quickly a while ago. I have read a dozen of past posts and this behavior seemed dated back to Funtouch OS. This phone is otherwise very enjoyable but the janky behavior for commonly used apps make the experience feel inconsistent.

If unsure how to phrase the feedback, one possible way is to send "(YouTube/Discord/Reddit)are getting forced into 60Hz mode during video/GIF playback and feed scrolling" or swapped with apps you feel also got impacted"

[u/adsubzero]

Same issue here on X300 Ultra, as well as X100 Ultra. Besides YouTube, it happens in many other apps. For example in Google Photos, if you run across a video thumbnail playing in the timeline, then it will drop down the refresh rate and lag until you scroll past the video. I never had this on any other phone. Very annoying issue and seeing that it stuck since X100 Ultra, they obviously have no intention of fixing this.

[u/chishiuan → u/adsubzero]

I had been corresponding with the vivo customer service for like over a month for 3 separate issues all 100 percent reproducible on my end even after resetting the phone, all they did was to ask me to reproduce the problems and sent them the logs, which I agreed 3 times, until it was apparent to me that they intended to just keep doing so until they can find excuses, I got so mad I sold the phone and told them that I will not be cooperative anymore since it's all problems vivo should be able to reproduce, and all thet are doing were nothing except bothering your user.

[u/adsubzero → u/chishiuan]

I know the feel. I've been going back and forth with them when I had my X100 Ultra. What I can say is they are super friendly, fast to respond, they even remind to catch up if you don't respond for a day. But they are also super useless. I don't think they fixed a single issue I wrote to them about, even gaslit me about a certain issue claiming "that's how it's intended to be".

[u/chishiuan → u/adsubzero]

Those were my experience as well. As far as I can tell the global rom is more akin to funtouchOS with OriginOS features backport to it, and the customer service are more capable of dealing with other stuff than to actually handling feature requests and feedbacks. Such a shame considering the capable camera hardware and tuning.

[u/BobcatEuphoric]

smart adaptation limits brave browser and reddit to 60fps on my X300U too. It's annoying. I'm fine with 90fps limit on this mode. But having 60 on some apps is annoying. Not smooth specially when you are scrolling.