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Mt44

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 19, 2014
158
285
I have it on my iPad Pro. But honestly, I’m not sure what the difference is when I scroll with my iPhone.

Is ProMotion on the iPhone 13 worth getting excited about?
 
I have it on my iPad Pro. But honestly, I’m not sure what the difference is when I scroll with my iPhone.

Is ProMotion on the iPhone 13 worth getting excited about?
You won’t notice ProMotion on a small screen, compared to having it on a larger screen device like a iPad.

Only reason these android phones have 120hz, is so they can stop the lag and that still hasn’t happened.

iPhones don’t need 120hz displays, they’re smooth enough with 60hz displays.
 
I believe ProMotion on the iPad Pro is mostly felt when you use the Apple Pencil. It automatically adjust depending on the content on the screen as you won't need high refresh rate seeing static text of 30fps videos.

The reason you may not feel much difference with the iPhone is because iOS UI is already smooth. One thing Apple did really well on iOS is that the animations and movements in general flows smoothly. And Apple really focused a lot on GPU and metal framework, allowing optimized accelerations for UI draws.

This is not the case on Android where even basic app drawer opening can be jittery as many OEMs are not optimizing their skins well. I have a Poco X3 NFC that has 120Hz refresh rate. Opening the app drawer always lags/jittery simply because the lack of optimization. High refresh rate can somewhat mask that, but not much. My iPhone 7+ feels smoother all the time compared to my 120Hz Poco. Imo Android is not solving things the right way. Instead of focusing in optimizing their OS/skin/GPU driver stack for smoother UI, they just tack on high refresh rate hoping it will "fix" their problem. The high refresh rate becomes a new megapixel/PPI number race, higher is better on paper.

On a decently optimized skin like Samsung OneUI on my S21, I actually ended up disabling the high refresh rate, keeping it at 60Hz. Setting the animations to 0.5x on developer options make the phone feels faster better than the high refresh rate.
 
Great, thoughtful responses. And kinda what I thought.

Some people seem pretty excited about ProMotion—more power to them—just trying to understand it.
 
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ProMotion looks great when playing games and general responsiveness. For me it is very hard to go back to a device that is without it. However, the smooth feeling is highly different from person to person. Many people don’t event notice.
 
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Me too I can’t tell on my 12.9 and 11 so I don’t get the big deal lol on a phone
 
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