This article is the third in a series of Systrace articles explaining why people always emphasize 60 FPS. 60 FPS is a software concept, which is different from the 60hz screen refresh rate mentioned in this article: the new smooth experience, 90Hz ramble

The purpose of this series is to use Systrace as a tool to look at Android from another perspective and learn about the Framework from another perspective. Maybe you read a lot of articles about the Framework, but can’t remember the code, or the process it runs through. Maybe you can understand it more deeply from the graphical perspective of Systrace.

Series of articles

  1. Systrace profile
  2. Systrace Basics – Systrace prep
  3. Systrace Basics – Why 60 FPS?
  4. Systrace basic knowledge – SystemServer interpretation
  5. Systrace Basics – SurfaceFlinger interpretation
  6. Systrace Basics – Input interpretation
  7. Systrace basics – Vsync interpretation
  8. Systrace Basics – Vsync-App: Choreographer based Rendering mechanics in detail
  9. Systrace Basics – MainThread and RenderThread interpretation
  10. Systrace Basics – Binder and lock competition interpretation
  11. Systrace Basics – Triple Buffer interpretation
  12. Systrace Basics – CPU Info interpretation

The body of the

So today we’re going to talk about why we’re talking about fluency, we’re going to talk about 60 frames first.

Let’s get the basics straight:

  1. 60 FPS means that the screen is updated 60 times per second
  2. The 60 updates should be evenly updated, not fast and slow, which would not be smooth visually
  3. 60 times per second, i.e. 1/60 ~= 16.67ms is updated once

Now that we understand the basic concepts above, let’s go back to Android. Why does Android now use 60 FPS as the standard for rendering? It has to do with the refresh rate of the screen.

The basic concept

  1. The 60 FPS we talked about earlier is for software
  2. Here said the screen refresh rate, is in view of the hardware, now most of the mobile phone screen refresh rate, maintain in 60 HZ, “mobile devices generally use 60 HZ, because mobile devices taller to the requirement of power consumption, increase the refresh rate of the phone’s screen, for mobile phones, logical power consumption will increase with the increase of frequency and linear, at the same time, higher refresh rate, That means shorter TFT data write times, which makes screen design more difficult.”
  3. The screen refresh rate of 60 HZ can only be said to be “sufficient”, which is the optimal solution under the current situation, but the future will definitely be the world of high refresh rate screens. Personally, IT mainly depends on the following breakthroughs: 4. Battery technology 5. Software technology 6. Hardware capability

To sum up, under the current situation, The Android rendering mechanism is drawn once at 16.67ms, and the 60Hz screen is also refreshed once at 16.67ms. Therefore, the Android phones you see are basically configured in this way, and the optimal solution at the current stage.

Effect of ascension

If you want to improve, software and hardware need to be improved together. One of them has basically no effect. For example, if your screen refresh rate is 75 Hz, software is 60 FPS, software rendering is 60 times per second, and you refresh 75 times, there is no effect except the repetition of frame rate. Similarly, if your screen has a refresh rate of 30 Hz and your software has a refresh rate of 60 FPS, half of your software’s 60 draws per second are discarded without any display.

If you want to experience a 120Hz refresh rate screen, I suggest you try the iPad Pro. After using it, you will feel that the 60Hz screen does have some room for improvement.

This article is mainly a brief introduction. If you want to know more about it, you can go to Google. In addition, Google has posted a short video about Why 60 FPS, and if you are qualified, you can watch it:

  1. Why 60 fps
  2. Why does a game need 60 frames to run smoothly, while a movie only needs 24

Here’s a picture of what an Android app needs to do in one frame, and we’ll talk more about this later:


About my && blog

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  3. Excellent Blog Post record – Android performance optimization is a must

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