Need help with seeking out an Android phone with emulation in mind

[BlackGuyRX]

I hope I'm posting this in the right place, but anyway-
My current phone is dying (ZTE Axon 7) and I'm looking to replace it. I mainly want something beefy enough for the majority of RA cores.

I thought about replacing it with the ROG Phone II since it's on sale but after seeing this https://zentalk.asus.com/en/discussion/ ... e/p1?new=1 and an ETA Prime review, I'm holding off of that for now. Either it's issues with the phone itself or lack of actual optimization for these devices since no emudev seems to have one. My biggest concern is input lag and stutter, are these things just unavoidable with Android devices? What should I be aware of when looking for a phone with emulation in mind?

[Chief Blur Buster]

See List of High Refresh Rate Smartphones — 90 Hz, 120 Hz, 240 Hz

A smartphone emulator needs to be programmed for 60fps at 120Hz refresh rate to reduce emulator input lag on Android. This is to keep the scanout velocity at maximum (www.blurbusters.com/scanout) -- otherwise at 60Hz, the scanout velocity slows down and input lag increases, and VSYNC ON framebuffer queue increases.

Most phones automatically switch to 60 Hz when presented with 60fps material, in order to save power. That is good, but can increase input lag of 60fps somewhat on certain devices. Desktop 120Hz does not have this problem because it doesn't have to aggressively power-manage as much (such as aggressively automatically switching to 60Hz for 60fps material in order to save power).

With modifications to an open-source Android emulator for proper 60fps at 120Hz, emulator lag will easily be halved.

The open source programmers need to program emulator to force a phone screen to 120 Hz
-- This may require an API call or simply presenting duplicate frame twice.
-- Other alternate techniques may be possible

Doing 60fps at 120Hz reduces input lag. This will force the phone's display to use double the velocity of its refresh cycles despite running at 60fps, and also reduce latency of emulator-to-photons. Unfortunately, most phones automatically switch to 60Hz when presented with 60fps frame rate, so this sometimes needs some workarounds. Some testing is required to improve upon this, as there might be some OS-only tricks that can force an existing emulator to reduce input lag. But it is wholly possible the emulators need some minor modifications.

It is possible that a little bit of modification to Android emulators is required to halve the input lag of emulators on 120Hz phones, to force 60fps framerates to output in 1/120sec instead of 1/60sec. So submit a new suggestion to the BugZillas, Github, and Issue Tracking tools -- to make sure the Android emulator authors are aware of the low-lag tricks for 120 Hz phones. Now, that said, this may not be necessary on all phones, but this should be experimented with, and test the emulatorfeel to see if that reduced input lag and/or improved fluidity.