The Pixel 4's 90Hz Display Only Works At High Brightness Levels

Reddit users have discovered that the Pixel 4's 90Hz refresh rate drops to 60Hz when the display brightness falls below 75 percent. This means that you're only getting the full 90Hz display rate when the brightness level is high. The Verge reports: It's not clear why Google has chosen the 75 percent mark, but droidlife has discovered you can head into the developer settings and force the 90Hz setting to always be enabled regardless of brightness levels. This will likely impact the battery life, which is something you'll want to consider before forcing the 90Hz display to always-on. Other 90Hz OLED Android phones like the OnePlus 7T keep the display running at its max 90Hz all of the time, but Google has stated it will automatically switch the display refresh rate on the Pixel 4 "for some content." Google issued a statement explaining its decision to limit the refresh rate, adding that it will issue an update in the coming weeks that will allow 90Hz in more brightness conditions.

Here's the full statement: "We designed Smooth Display so that users could enjoy the benefits of 90Hz for improved UI interactions and content consumption, while also preserving battery when higher refresh rates are not critical by lowering back down to 60Hz. In some conditions or situations, however, we set the refresh rate to 60Hz. Some of these situations include: when the user turns on battery saver, certain content such as video (as it's largely shot at 24 or 30fps), and even various brightness or ambient conditions. We constantly assess whether these parameters lead to the best overall user experience. We have previously planned updates that we'll roll out in the coming weeks that include enabling 90hz in more brightness conditions."

As for whether or not 90Hz has a serious impact on battery life, YouTube Tech Reviewer Matthew Moniz reports only a marginal difference.

All this talk of 90Hz..

[grasshoppa]

....can anyone who has used it at 90Hz comment on the quality of such an improvement? Is the change noticeable? Is it beneficial?

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[DigitAl56K]

....can anyone who has used it at 90Hz comment on the quality of such an improvement? Is the change noticeable? Is it beneficial?

Before we get into that, can people actually distinguish between 90Hz and the device simply being faster? I.e. would it have been a much better experience at 60Hz also?

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[UnknownSoldier]

There are HUGE differences between 30 Hz, 60 Hz, and 120 Hz. Not everyone can spot the difference and there are definitely decreasing returns past ~60+ Hz but in general anything > 90 Hz is will appear silky smooth and is much more pleasant on the eyes then crappy 30 Hz.

Run this test to tell if your browser supports 60+ Hz.

* https://www.testufo.com/ [testufo.com]

Magic speaker wires work. Real life is 60fps

[raymorris]

> ..can anyone who has used it at 90Hz comment on the quality of such an improvement?

People who use $300 speaker wires will tell you that they make a noticeable improvement. Physics be damned. Unless of course you tell them that the $10 wire cost $300 and vice-versa. Whichever wire they THINK is expensive is "noticably better". So I'd take any replies with a grain of salt.

Walking around your kitchen, lit by a fluorescent light, you're seeing real life at 60 fps. Since the electricity in your house

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[lurcher]

If that's the case, maybe you could explain how a strobe disk on a turntable (not one where the turntable provides the light) works under fluorescent light, but doesn't under a LED equivalent?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Quite simply - it doesn't work under modern fluorescent lights. Strobe disks were used with incandescent lights mainly. The kind of fluorescent light you'd find in a kitchen these days should not strobe. There's whole threads on turntable websites about it
https://www.vinylengine.com/tu... [vinylengine.com]

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[tlhIngan]

Quite simply - it doesn't work under modern fluorescent lights. Strobe disks were used with incandescent lights mainly. The kind of fluorescent light you'd find in a kitchen these days should not strobe. There's whole threads on turntable websites about it

Incandescent bulbs do not flicker. They are electrically heated filaments that give off light, and there is enough residual to keep it lit during the zero crossing.

Old style fluorescent tubes did flicker at 120Hz (twice line frequency) because they stopped

Re:Magic speaker wires work. Real life is 60fps

[dacut]

Walking around your kitchen, lit by a fluorescent light, you're seeing real life at 60 fps.

For fluorescent light, it ends up being 120 Hz (fps). While the voltage has positive and negative peaks that make up one period, that ends up being two energy peaks as far as the bulb is concerned. (Have had to filter this out when doing light diode projects in the past.)

Folks (including me) who complain about fluorescent lights flickering are actually complaining about the ballast not keeping the bulb energized, which happens at a much lower (and irritating frequency). (That can happen for any number of reasons: cold, old bulb, ballast going bad, etc.) I greatly prefer LEDs these days (which are either DC or kHz range on the switching power supply).

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[tlhIngan]

Folks (including me) who complain about fluorescent lights flickering are actually complaining about the ballast not keeping the bulb energized, which happens at a much lower (and irritating frequency). (That can happen for any number of reasons: cold, old bulb, ballast going bad, etc.) I greatly prefer LEDs these days (which are either DC or kHz range on the switching power supply).

The ballast does not keep the fluorescent tube "pwoered". Its purpose is to limit the power drawn by the tube. It's a giant in

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[mobby_6kl]

This is not anything remotely like the audiophile nonsense. You can very clearly see how much smoother things are with increased framerate. Motion perception is much more complicated than just FPS (the time the pixels are lit are also important for example), and there are diminishing returns of course but it's not anything crazy.

And if you read the summary, they actually say that they're already doing adaptive framerate for static or low-fps content.

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[raymorris]

To be clear, I'm not saying fps is nonsense. I'm saying that if you ask people who buy top of the line electronics for their subjective opinion about their perceptions, the answers you get will be VERY subjective. To the point of sometimes being non-sensical.

> And if you read the summary, they actually say that they're already doing adaptive framerate for static or low-fps content.

And yet I'll bet you can find plenty of examples of people saying that they can tell the difference on the screen when rea

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[mobby_6kl]

And yet I'll bet you can find plenty of examples of people saying that they can tell the difference on the screen when reading web pages. Even though a) the screen is actually at a low framerate, they just don't know that, and b) with nothing changing on the screen, effective framerate is actually below 1fps.

Well it does make a big difference when scrolling. Thad said, yeah some people see all sort of weird stuff that doesn't actually exist.

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[jemmyw]

I have a oneplus 7pro. I can't tell the difference. So I turned it to 60Hz to save battery. I then disabled all the animations I could, which actually improved your speed perception anyway.

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[Thrakkerzog]

I have a OnePlus 7T and can definitely see the difference when scrolling.

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[hey!]

This news inclines me to think it *might* be a noticeable improvement under certain conditions.

You design a device like this to be demo'd in a showroom -- where the user will be impressed by silly things like its thinness. But in the real world, the user pays through things like having to use a smaller battery because of limited chassis volume.

I suspect that 90Hz looks impressive under showroom conditions but in the real world is not as useful as another half hour of battery life every day.

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[twocows]

Higher framerate could be beneficial in certain kinds of games. I don't think most people would notice or care, though. This isn't the days of the CRT where a low refresh rate meant you were staring at a blinking light bulb that would give you a headache over time.

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[AmiMoJo]

I have played with a OnePlus 7 with 90Hz display for about 30 minutes and it was really nice. Extremely smooth and fluid scrolling and animations. When scrolling it's easier to follow text, for example. The same is true on computer monitors, it's worth getting a "gaming" monitor that can do 90+Hz just for extra smooth desktop use.

Only at 75+% brightness*

[Zaelath]

1. Yeah, good.
2. *by default.

Probably would annoy the hell out of me

[Powercntrl]

First thing I did when getting a smartphone was turn off the auto-brightness. The constantly fluctuating brightness makes it seem like the display has something wrong with it.

Having a screen that sometimes refreshes at 90Hz and sometimes 60Hz would probably just get on my nerves just as much (and yeah, I know what it looks like - a friend has the iPad Pro with the faster refresh rate). At least they give you the option to turn it off, even if it is buried in the developer settings.

that is acceptable

[FudRucker]

60hz is good enough, i rather have a phone that lasts 5 years @60hz than a phone that only lasts 2 or 3 years @90hz

Too bad its camera never reaches 60Hz

[melted]

Too bad its camera never reaches 60Hz when shooting 4K video. :-)

Not bright

[akunkel]

That does not seem very bright.

whats the point

[redback]

I never use my phone above 75% brightness unless im outside and its sunny

My guess

[dkman]

My guess would be that if you set the brightness below 75% you can about battery life. I would assume that refreshing at 60Hz uses less battery than refreshing at 120Hz, so they made the decision to drop to 60 based on saving battery no some "you don't need it" maliciousness.
Having a setting where you can go say "give me 120 regardless" gives you the best of both worlds.

So, reasonable engineering trade off?

[mccrew]

So it sounds to me like the Google folks made a reasonable engineering trade off, where you can have smoother video experience at the cost of battery life, or better battery life by avoiding the additional power drain. They picked a threshold - 75% - could have been some other number, but that's what they chose, as the cutoff.

I'm reminded of the saying "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Sounds like reasonable engineering judgment to me.

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[samwichse]

I mean, the dimmer the OLED is set, the slower it is to change. My phone is at to minimum right now and the motion blur is palpable. Like scrolling white text on a black background causes the text to dim out while it's moving.

They probably picked 75% as the point where the motion blur made the extra frame rate unnoticeable anyway.