When I open Pokemon TCGP normally I never hit 60 fps, even on high performance graphics settings and when I close all other apps. When I activate battery saver, the game becomes really smooth and I have no idea why. What exactly does battery saver do and why does it not decrease the game’s performance, which is the expected result?
Can somebody test this with other games? It’s really confusing.
I “only” have an FP3 and I don’t play games, but I made a similar observation: Recently, after installing my 2nd battery after 5.5 years, I turned off Battery Saver (which probably helped me reach those 5.5 y).
WITH b.saver I was always annoyed that switching between apps or tabs often meant a complete reload, losing previous input or logins. It seems that only the current app / tab is held in working memory, and background processes (mail, messengers, …) are reduced, too. Maybe that means that more resources for the app you are currently using are available, hence better performance? Although I thought that b.saver would also reduce CPU cores / GHz etc.
WITHOUT b.saver, such multitasking works much smoother. But regularly, apps or the whole phone freeze for 10 sec to 1 min, very frustrating. Feels that too much is going on for keeping it in working memory, so memory content has to be stored in (slower) flash memory, in a sometimes uncoordinated way. Maybe related to having more and heavier apps today than when FP3 came out. Anyone had that experience as well?
Isn’t ZRAM active in FPOS? That would mean with several active Apps, the RAM gets compressed to fit more data. That could cause lags with many open apps, because the space for uncompressed-(in use)-data is limited and games need a lot of it. Battery-saver ends some apps, maybe enough to prevent swapping between compressed & uncompressed ram-areas.
However, I can’t find any information about the usage of ZRAM in FPOS.
Thanks, that sounds plausible.
Still the overall situation leaves me worried that our FPs (or any other smartphone) outdate faster than we’d like: New Android and App versions getting heavier, usage patterns and habits get more intense (partly from “addiction” which should be fought, partly from new functionality and from society trends, e.g. needing an app for every store, civil authority, travel company, smart home system, …).
In PCs and Laptops, we can upgrade memory, CPUs etc., but with smartphones, even FPs, we can’t do that. To me, this seems a major sustainability blocker. Android 16 on FP3 in 2026 (making the numbers up) sounds good, but may not work in practice because performance may be intolerable.
At least the possibility of a RAM upgrade would help a lot. Or: Fit the phone with lots of RAM from the start so it will be good for the promised lifetime (and not just as a secondary or emergency phone!), even though that makes it more expensive (which I think can be explained and turned into an advantage).