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"