Stuttery, poor framerate on Galaxy S4

[TomL]

... i just purchased a Galaxy S4 and ... was completely over my iphone and wanted to get away from it, but i have noticed there is still ball stutter/jitter every couple of seconds or so with the latest version of TPA 1.16.0 ... Any feedback would be appreciated guys ...

You can try installing this free benchmarking app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.nena.nenamark2 and see what numbers you get when you run it.

You can try to improve your performance by limiting any non-TPA things the phone may be doing at the moment. Signing out of messaging apps, turning off any network auto-syncing, going into Airplane Mode, disabling any saving features, these might all help you improve your performance.

Tom

 

[Off2War]

Hi Tom, i don't have much installed on my phone as its only a few days old, TPA was the first thing I installed and used after i powered on the phone. I have turned a few things off here and there which i have read about, not exactly sure if i have missed some "advanced" settings i should be playing around with also such as adjusting developer settings???? Im not sure if this would help or not, although don't feel to confident in adjusting such settings just yet on my phone especially if there is no need too. With all this done same result with ball stutter/jitter on TPA

Installed NenaMark2 ran it twice, first score was 59.5fps, second score was 59.9fps. Closed app and cleared ram on the phone in task manager, ran NenaMark2 numerous times again with consistent scores of 60fps - 60.2fps... I'm guessing this is just a problem that hopefully just needs further tweaking by Farsight as the phone itself doesn't seem to be the problem??? If I have missed something or others are experiencing similar problems please let me know

 

[Matt McIrvin]

What I observe is that, on a variety of Android devices, there are some specific tables that have a lot of performance/framerate issues. Dr. Dude is one of the worst; unfortunately, Flight 2000 is another one. Centaur and Twilight Zone stutter a little bit, but not as much as those. There are others that are usually smooth as glass, like Black Hole and even Star Trek: TNG.

If I recall correctly, Black Hole initially had really low-resolution meshes on Android, with pop bumpers that looked like octagons, and it was claimed to be for performance reasons. Eventually, they went back and did further rounds of tuning, and got it to a state where it both looks great and plays great. I've done some performance tuning on Android myself and I know how much of a case-by-case slog it can be; different devices can have very different performance characteristics, and benchmarking apps won't necessarily tell you what you really need to know. But there are some tables that seem to generally hit the system harder than others.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

So... I just got myself a Galaxy S4, and I can report that I'm not seeing any of these problems. I think I noticed a bit of a hiccup once.

And The Pinball Arcade looks really good on that 5-inch OLED.

 

[Baron Rubik]

So... I just got myself a Galaxy S4, and I can report that I'm not seeing any of these problems. I think I noticed a bit of a hiccup once.

And The Pinball Arcade looks really good on that 5-inch OLED.

Welcome to the club - happy new phone!

 

[Matt McIrvin]

Welcome to the club - happy new phone!

Thanks! I've messed around with TPA on a number of different Android devices, but the experience on the S4 is particularly slick.

(The one major glitch I noticed happened when I switched out of the app in the middle of a game, without pausing it first; upon resuming, time seemed sped up by a factor of several, and then the app hung and restarted. I know from past experience that TPA can play poorly with activity pause/resume. Some of the application UI elements also look a bit small on the super-high-res screen.)

 

[Matt McIrvin]

OK, I have reproduced the problem! Or a problem of this sort.

It happened after the Galaxy S4 had been running continuously for a couple of days of fairly heavy use. The phone got into a state in which The Pinball Arcade started stuttering quite a lot, with a very noticeable pause happening every few seconds. It was enough to make the game hard to play.

Switching from high to normal textures might have reduced the frequency, but it was hard to tell; it was still happening.

Powering down the phone and restarting it made the problem go away!

I'd been using it on battery, gotten a low-power indication, and had just plugged it into a charger, but I don't know if this is significant: the problem persisted after unplugging it, and also after halting and restarting TPA.

The nature of the problem suggests to me that it's some kind of memory-management or process-management issue that sets in after a longish period of use. And it might be systemic, not something about TPA in particular. The phone UI seemed otherwise perfectly usable and smooth, but I wasn't playing any other frame-rate-critical games, so periodic stutters on the level I was seeing in TPA might have gone unnoticed otherwise. I tried to figure out whether I could see a stutter in the paging animation in the home launcher, but this was hard to discern. The seeming interaction with low-battery/recharging suggests a power-management problem, but this could have just been a coincidence.

At any rate, there seems to be a good workaround: reboot the phone.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

At any rate, there seems to be a good workaround: reboot the phone.

Another possible clue: before I had this Galaxy S4, I had the T-Mo/Samsung "Sidekick 4G", not a real Danger OS Sidekick but a low-end Android handset (perpetually running Froyo) with a sliding screen and nice keyboard. On <i>that</i>, TPA would often hang on startup, sometimes hanging the phone to the point of requiring reboot. Immediately after reboot TPA would generally work all right. It's possible that if this is a memory-management issue, that was a more extreme manifestation of the same kind of thing.

 

[Spud]

I'd been using it on battery, gotten a low-power indication, and had just plugged it into a charger

I've never really been able to play tpa with the the phone charging (Galaxy Nexus). Fps drops and flipper lag. Doesn't really bother me. If I've played long enough to kill the battery it's time for a break!

I've never tried the note 10.1 while charging. That could be awkward....

 

[Matt McIrvin]

I've never really been able to play tpa with the the phone charging (Galaxy Nexus). Fps drops and flipper lag. Doesn't really bother me. If I've played long enough to kill the battery it's time for a break!

I've never tried the note 10.1 while charging. That could be awkward....

Interesting, very interesting. I wonder why!

 

[MonkeyGrass]

Interesting, very interesting. I wonder why!

Dunno, but the same thing happened on my Note 10.1 last night... first time I ever tried to play with it hooked up to the charger and every time a multiball would kick in, it started lagging and dropping.

 

[Worf]

Are you using the official charger or a 3rd party one?

The official charger should have no effect, but 3rd party ones are known to be noisy which can disable touchscreens. Usually it'll be unplayable as the touch screen doesn't work, period, but perhaps it's just noisy enough to generate a lot of touch events and consume a lot of CPU time.

Then again, maybe the official charger is like that too - usually the really cheap ones generate so much noise you can't use it at all.

 

[Spud]

Stock

 

[TomL]

Are you using the official charger or a 3rd party one?

The official charger should have no effect, but 3rd party ones are known to be noisy which can disable touchscreens. Usually it'll be unplayable as the touch screen doesn't work, period, but perhaps it's just noisy enough to generate a lot of touch events and consume a lot of CPU time.

Then again, maybe the official charger is like that too - usually the really cheap ones generate so much noise you can't use it at all.

+1 to what Worf stated here. I'll add that even stock chargers, as they age, will get noisier and weaker. I've seen the bad charger behavior manifest as phantom screen presses, inaccurate touch tracking etc from cheap knockoff chargers. I've seen previously fine stock chargers go bad after years of use too.

 

[MonkeyGrass]

Brand new Note 10.1.

Brand new, 3 days out of the box stock OEM charger.

I doubt it is the hardware, nothing else does this when it's plugged in.

 

[mpclemens]

Do you have any software settings to kick in only when it's plugged it? NFC, GPS, WiFi, software updates... Sounds to me like something is starting up, but only when it can be assured of not draining your battery.

 

[netizen]

I would guess that the power saving mode turns on when the power gets below a certain point, and that it throttles cpu cycles to make the battery last longer when it is low.

You'll have to check the settings to see if it is enabled, or if you can disable the throttling if you want to keep the power saving that reduces the screen power etc.

 

[Baron Rubik]

I would guess that the power saving mode turns on when the power gets below a certain point, and that it throttles cpu cycles to make the battery last longer when it is low.

You'll have to check the settings to see if it is enabled, or if you can disable the throttling if you want to keep the power saving that reduces the screen power etc.

No this behaviour doesn't happen.

Power saving mode on the SGS4 is either on or off and isn't controlled by battery level.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

Well, that setting is either on or off. What the setting actually does could be another matter.

 

[Baron Rubik]

Well, that setting is either on or off. What the setting actually does could be another matter.

Interesting point.

Can't Google anything other than speculation though in the 10mins I tried.

Proof would be...
With power saving off. 100% bat. Run Nena mk2 benchmark.
And repeat each time device battery drops 10% until shutdown.