While the Pixel 4 has been announced about a week back, several problems have been plaguing the device already. There is the problem of face unlock working with your eyes closed or the Pixel 4’s battery being excessively small and more recently the phone’s aggressive lowering the refresh rate from 90 Hz to 60 Hz without giving any particular reason why it is doing so. Now Google has said that it will be announcing a fix for this refresh rate problem via a new update.
A few Redditors have discovered that the refresh rate of the screen will drop to 60 Hz if your screen brightness is less than 75 percent. As per a report by The Verge, the screen will refresh at 90 Hz at lower brightness levels if the ambient lighting in the room is bright enough.
Google said in a statement to The Verge that “In some conditions or situations, we set the refresh rate to 60Hz. few circumstances include: when the user uses the battery saver, specific video content(as it’s largely shot at 24 or 30fps), and even different brightness conditions. We regularly evaluate whether these parameters guide to the best overall user experience. We have earlier planned updates that we’ll roll out in the coming weeks that include enabling 90 Hz in more brightness conditions.”
Unlike a few smartphones which support high refresh rate displays, such as the OnePlus 7T (Review) and 7T Pro, there is no option accessible in the Pixel 4 for locking the screen at 90 Hz in all conditions. It would appear that Google might bring out this option in this upcoming update or at the very least improve its algorithms to keep the 90 Hz refresh rate accessible in more conditions.
