[Samsung Galaxy S20 / S20+ / S20 Ultra Questions & ] auToeXeC_g33k:
Hey!

So I've recently bought an S20 from T-Mobile. It's a Hungarian model (980F). I'm facing some weird behavior here.

The issue:

In every game I play, from simple 2D connect-three and idle games, to intense things like Asphalt 9, what happens is that for a random amount of time (i've seen everything from 1 second to 10 minutes) the framerate just tanks. And I'm not talking about the Exynos performance fiasco here. This happens regardless of how long I use the phone or how hot it gets.

Some concrete examples:

- So, the cold phone can achieve a relatively stable 60 fps in Asphalt 9. After prolonged gaming, when the phone reaches a temp equilibrium, framerates settle at around 45 fps. That's fine for me, not the topic of this thread. But, sometimes I play for hours, and I keep this steady 45-ish framerate, other times I just pick up the phone, completely cold, and the second I start up the game, even the menu lags, at precisely 20 fps (I measure this with PerfZ). After some time passes, everything is back to normal, 60 fps. Then, again, randomly 20, then back to 60 again.

- I play Adventure Communist a lot (a simple idle button clicker game, nothing graphically intensive) and well as you can imagine, it's fine at 60. But sometimes this game also drops to exactly 20 fps for some random time, then back to normal.

- Subway Surfers runs at 120 stable. This game does not drop to 20, it drops to more like 40ish something (I have not measured an exact number here, just going by feeling).

- As I've said, this all happens regardless of heat. What I've also found is that GPU usage drops down significantly when this happens, as if something artificially limited the game for the time being (like something put an FPS cap on it).

- Interestingly, some games are unaffacted: PUBG Mobile, for example, heats the phone up like hell. After a good 30-40 minutes the framerate drops to well below the cap, but I've never had the issue during any session. The phone just throttles normally, but that's it. Games originally limited to 30 fps also don't experience this (or at least I haven't noticed). Forza Street also stresses the hardware pretty well, that game also drops from 60 to 50 something fps, but never had this weird back and forth switch between 20 and 60 fps. Strange.

What I've tried:

- Changing brightness

- Changing volume

- Through game booster, changing the preferred performance levels

- Downloading game booster plus and messing with it

- Turning on high performance mode in device care

- Disabling adaptive battery, turning off battery optimizations

- Disabling everything network related

- Factory resetting

- I went to a Samsung store, told the technician everything, showed him a vid, he said they've never seen anything like this, if I wanted I could leave the phone there for a software checkup... well... I didn't

- there might have been more things i've tried i cant remember right now, i've tried a lot of things, believe me...

Online research results:

So obviously, where do people go with these problems, of course, Reddit. Now, I haven't found anything about this when I tried searching for gaming related issues, but I've found a thread where a dude complains about his Ultra scrolling at lowered framerates sometimes (which by the way also happens to me, I just chose to ignore it for some reason). In this thread, I've found another dude, who posted a video he made about games, with the exact same issue that I have! So at least 1 other guy has this in the world... And basically this is it. Haven't been able to find anything useful besides this, every other post is just about the Exynos chip being inferior and things like that. I have some videos of it, but my account is fresh so I can't post any links. Just google "S20 Ultra scroll stutter", and the first Reddit post with the same name is what I'm talking about. It's a short thread. You'll find the comment.

I'm pretty sure this is unrelated to the whole "Exynos is trash" topic, as it doesn't depend on temperatures. Also, the fact that this happens in a lot of games, but not in others leads me to believe there might be some system level/software issue here. Also, GPU usage drops when it happens (as I said, like something capped it), this suggests to me the same, some software-level limitation.

Has any of you heard of or encountered this before? Do you have any other ideas what might cause this, and how to fix it?

Thanks for your help.