Anything that can be done about the touchscreen latency?

Asterra

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I realize that basically no makers of smartphones or other devices with touch interfaces have jumped onto this particular bandwagon yet, but it's still just a little disappointing that my new S10 Plus has the same exact ~120ms latency as the Note 2 I upgraded from. According to what scant information is available on this topic, this is on the high end of the scale for mobile devices. And even for Samsung mobile devices. The only suggestion I've seen to other people questioning this phenomenon is to turn off the animation of various things from the developer options -- proving they didn't understand what the problem was, since that has nothing at all to do with it.

It just seems odd to me that touchscreens with 1-millisecond response time were kicked around something like a decade ago, but we're still all perfectly happy with visual elements visually lagging behind our fingers so significantly that even the most casual of user can easily see it happening. I guess what I'm hoping here is that maybe somebody has developed a fancy experimental hack that somehow improves this facet of the device.
 

fuzzylumpkin

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Buy a OnePlus phone?

Sorry to be flippant, but if latency or lag is something that really concerns you, then you should not be buying from Samsung.
 

bassplayrguy

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Buy a OnePlus phone?

Sorry to be flippant, but if latency or lag is something that really concerns you, then you should not be buying from Samsung.
It is the same across the board. That I believe is part of th OPs frustration. I believe the issue is the millisecond between your finger touching the screen and the screen registering that touch. Not animation scale or lag.
 

V J

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Of all the qualities smartphones need to improve upon I'd gander this is at the bottom of the list.
 

Asterra

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Of all the qualities smartphones need to improve upon I'd gander this is at the bottom of the list.

You never know. Context helps. Until just a couple of years ago, TV makers were completely ignoring the topic of input lag. They had universally deemed it unimportant. Then LG had a minor scandal with their flagship OLED models and they got a lot of backlash over it -- something that could not be fixed with firmware. The very next models, LG set an unprecedented bar for input lag across ALL of their lineup, forcing every manufacturer to immediately play catch-up, which they did. In two short years, TVs went from averaging 50+ ms in "game mode" to the current state of things where you'd be extremely hard-pressed to find a TV that doesn't offer sub-20ms latency in every mode that doesn't involve frame interpolation.

This is what I expect will one day happen with smartphones. One of these makers will recognize what a great gimmick it would be to be able to show off instantaneous response to one's finger-scrolling, making their contemporaries look like they got caught with their pants down. And after that, I won't have to make threads like this. The problem I have with the current state of things is that it is exactly as arbitrary and unnecessary as the TV lag issue that existed until recently. The technology's around, but there hasn't been that kick in the pants to push it as a feature, so we get stuck with a senseless grab bag. And, yes, I can't avoid being just a little POed that Samsung's newest flagship ranks among the worst.
 

Asterra

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It also had a removable battery, but it's 2019 now so it doesn't really matter what the S6 did.
Chief, the point made was the underscoring of how smartphone latency is a total crapshoot because it sits on that dubious edge between makers not giving a s*** and there being no reasonable technical barriers to improving it. Basically the same exact state of affairs TVs were in until the last couple of years.
 

fuzzylumpkin

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Chief, the point made was the underscoring of how smartphone latency is a total crapshoot because it sits on that dubious edge between makers not giving a s*** and there being no reasonable technical barriers to improving it. Basically the same exact state of affairs TVs were in until the last couple of years.

See the problem is i don't agree that the problem is OEMs don't give a shirt. The problem in my opinion is physics.

When you touch the screen or a phone, you're not interacting with single physical object. You are interacting with a large loop of hardware and software components, and that takes time.
 
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bkeaver

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I want to know how your measuring that 120ms of latency? As Mustang7757 mentioned I experience no noticable latency on mine either.
 

Morty2264

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I believe this kind of thing affects all smartphones to some degree. But to me, it's never been noticeable. Things like age of the smartphone, apps running in the background, etc may be factors that affects the operation of the device.
 

Asterra

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I want to know how your measuring that 120ms of latency? As Mustang7757 mentioned I experience no noticable latency on mine either.

I wondered if anyone would ask this. There's a quite straightforward way of measuring the true latency. And by "true" I mean latency that hasn't been artificially faked with predictive algorithms. For the sake of accuracy, you might want to record yourself performing the following action.

Find any page that can be scrolled up and down. Now scroll it up and down without removing your finger from the screen. Find the rhythm that causes the screen's scrolling cadence to be the exact opposite of your finger's cadence -- i.e. it has hit the "up" peak when your finger is at the "down" peak, and vice-versa. Now, if you understand exactly how long a second is, you can count-slash-approximate how many times you scroll up/down during the course of one second while maintaining this rhythm. In the case of the S10+, this results in a tad over 4 times per second -- meaning each up/down sequence takes a bit less than 250ms. Cut that in half and you have your latency.

Otherwise you can just record yourself interacting with the phone in this manner and then count frames. Less convenient, but useful for anyone not confident in the technique or their estimation of a second's length.

I've used some devices where the latency of the touchscreen is too low to make this method practical, but the S10+ makes it all too easy.
 

Asterra

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When you touch the screen or a phone, you're not interacting with single physical object. You are interacting with a large loop of hardware and software components, and that takes time.
Granted. But you are phrasing it as if to conclude that 100% of that time is the fault of said software.

Manifestly not.

Before TV makers finally got dragged by LG into today's world of universally low latency, they were at least aware of the problem, and offered a "game mode" which mostly bypassed the software consideration you refer to. The resulting latency, which was still reliably high by today's standards, was almost entirely the fault of "who gives a damn" electronics. And that's where, I resolutely argue, the vast majority of smartphone latency is coming from, at least with the S10+. An OS-free simple GUI using this phone's screen would most likely exhibit the same exact latency.
 

fuzzylumpkin

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Granted. But you are phrasing it as if to conclude that 100% of that time is the fault of said software.

Manifestly not.

Before TV makers finally got dragged by LG into today's world of universally low latency, they were at least aware of the problem, and offered a "game mode" which mostly bypassed the software consideration you refer to. The resulting latency, which was still reliably high by today's standards, was almost entirely the fault of "who gives a damn" electronics. And that's where, I resolutely argue, the vast majority of smartphone latency is coming from, at least with the S10+. An OS-free simple GUI using this phone's screen would most likely exhibit the same exact latency.

No, I said hardware and software. In fact, i said it's a physics problem, software is a factor but hardware is at least as important.

Comparing input latency on a phone to response time on a TV is a total false equivalency.
 
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