Dear Nothing Community,

I was wondering if there are Pokémon GO players among us and are experiencing this behaviour?

I’ve owned the Nothing Phone 2 since its release date and while I very much love it (Nothing OS ftw! Excited for 3.0!) there’s a thing that has been bugging me.

I’ve been playing Pokémon Go for a while now on multiple devices and I can tell that performance wise, something is holding back the Nothing Phone 2.
While the FPS counter shows 60fps or 120fps or in between, the game doesn’t feel like it’s hitting those numbers, more like half of it. (Yes, native refresh rate in-game is enabled) Other issues are higher ‘touchscreen’ to ‘game reactivity’ latency (example: throwing Pokéballs) and hiccups while opening in-game menu’s, scrolling, PvP.
I’m comparing with the performance of a Samsung S21 FE, iPad Pro 2017, iPhone 12… which are devices that are less powerful than a Nothing Phone 2.
Compared to another game like Pokémon Unite; it perfectly hits 60fps, it feels like 60fps, has low latency and no hiccups.

I don’t know if this is a bug that Niantic or Nothing needs to patch or update, but it has been there since the beginning. After multiple updates (and a factory reset) this “bug”(?) is still there.

I’ve been playing with the screen refresh rate settings to check what behaviour I could get.

Troubleshooting steps -> close the game -> change the refresh rate settings -> start the game.
Second step by using a workaround -> close the game -> open it and while its loading -> open in “popup” view -> once loaded, go to full screen

- Fixed 60 fps -> doesn’t feel like 60 fps -> counter dips under the 60fps with hiccups
If I open popup view on loading screen then full screen -> feels a bit more stable but still dips under 60

- Fixed 120 fps -> feels like 60 fps -> dips under 60fps with hiccups
If I open popup view on loading screen then full screen -> a lot smoother, feels like almost hitting 120fps still with dips and hiccups.

- Dynamic -> caps at 60 fps and doesn’t feel like 60 fps -> a lot of dips under the 60fps
If I open popup view on loading screen then full screen -> is somewhat smoother but mostly caps at 90 with a lot of dips under 90

If I stay in the popup view the game feels very responsive with a variable fps above 100. There are a few dips around the 80fps but they don’t cause any hiccups! I feel like this is the way how the game should feel when I compare with other devices and games. The high latency I was experiencing also when throwing a Pokéball, opening the menu’s scrolling etc are gone!

(To anyone DON’T DO THIS!) I’ve also been experiencing with the SetEdit App to force the refresh rate by changing the values of “peak_refresh_rate” as suggested by some.
And while that worked for a while I will never ever touch this again as after an OS update my phone got stuck in a boot loop. (I had to factory reset the phone)

I’ve been searching in ‘Nothing Community’ but failed to find a thread reporting this issue, so I wonder am I the only one with this problem?
If not, is this the good way to report this? Is there another workaround than playing the game in ‘popup view’?

I thank you in advance for your time reading this. Hopefully this can be fixed.

Kind regards,

Maxime