While Apple Does Not Support 120 Hz TestUFO, Xiaomi Uses TestUFO To Demo 144 Hz Redmi 5G Smartphone

Posted Jan 16, 2020 by in: Gaming Laptops & Phones TestUFO

Xiaomi’s Redmi K30 5G Uses TestUFO For Live Refresh Rate Demo

Recently, Xiaomi used a TestUFO animation to demonstrate their high-refresh-rate support on their smartphones. This is a testament to how easy and widespread our motion test website, TestUFO.com is, in sharing refresh rate demonstrations.

TestUFO Is Extremely Popular Worldwide For Testing All Displays

Today, TestUFO now currently receives as many visitors from China as from USA! It illustrates how popular these motion tests are in confirming the refresh rate of their displays. People trust TestUFO and other Blur Busters inventions in testing displays, and it is a natural that they used an industry standard display motion test as a demonstration — many recognize the UFO, which we originally invented as a test pattern before it became our official Blur Busters logo.

Fixing “UNSUPPORTED”: White-Listing New Browsers For High-Hz Support

We observe the now-false “UNSUPPORTED” message in the video. Formerly, most WebKit browsers did not sync to full refresh rate, but apparently this does.

To vendors that would like to white-list their web browsers to SUPPORTED status instead of UNSUPPORTED status — please contact us at [email protected] to get your web browser whitelisted. We will update TestUFO to support your new high-Hz compatible mobile web browser.

Standardization of High Hz in Web Browsers

This is an interim process until high Hz is more well standardized in browsers. For years, Blur Busters has trail-blazed the discussion of standardization of high-Hz in web browsers. Ever since our first 120 Hz Web Browser Tests in year 2013, and various submissions to Chromium and FireFox projects, nearly all web browsers now has converged into a defacto standard.

Retina resolution behavior is now standardized in browsers, but retina refresh rates are not. All browser animation mechanisms need to support high Hz (all APIs, including legacy and modern). From time to time, we have worked with browser standardization, though this takes time, often years. We recently joined WHATWG and a new issue has been submitted to WHATWG as of January 2020. 

Documents Limited to 0 Hz; Videos Limited To 60 Hz; Browsers No Limitation

It is hard to share benefits of high-Hz in a document (limited to 0 Hz) or a video (limited to 60fps).

Browser animations such as TestUFO is a shareable medium that breaks the frame rate barrier. Practically, it is the world’s only easiest shareable method of demonstrating the benefits of high refresh rates worldwide. This is increasingly important in the new refresh rate race to retina refresh rates.

This helps sells high-Hz screens for everyone.

Web Browser animations remain the best and easiest way of sharing high-Hz benefits. Almost a decade ago, Blur Busters was prescient in recognizing that this broke the limitations of documents & videos.

Apple Remains a Laggard On 120 Hz Browser Support

Currently, Apple does not support 120 Hz in TestUFO.  All other vendors other than Apple now support high refresh rates in TestUFO, including 90 Hz, 120 Hz and 144 Hz. Even Google, Samsung and Microsoft (new Edge) now supports high-Hz in TestUFO in compliance with Section 7.1.4.2 of W3C HTML 5.2 standard.

Apple already has 120 Hz iPads. The next iPhone is widely assumed to include 120 Hz. Minimally, It will be important for Apple to reconsider the addition of basic 120 Hz support to Safari, but it is great to see all other smartphone vendors successfully lead the way in supporting high-refresh-rate TestUFO.

Battery Efficiency Of 120+ Hz Browser Mostly Resolved

Currently a WebKit developer back in 2017 expressed a legitimate concern about battery consumption worries. However, in 2020 with more efficient mobile chips, the battery consumption overhead of high-Hz is a much lower percentage than it was in 2017.

The same power-consumption conern was true for retina-resolution screens, in that they consumed way more power, but the power consumption differential is much less nowadays.

In addition, battery consumption concerns of high-Hz in browers, can also easily be allayed by letting the users choose between efficiency and performance. For now, other vendors than Apple, now lead the way in high-Hz mobile browser standardization.

Compatibility Issues Of 120+ Hz Browser Mostly Resolved

Back in 2017, compatibility issues were claimed. However, this has largely resolved in 2020 for more popular web pages, as web developers have been gradually reprogramming them to match industry standard behaviours to be more motion-adaptive.

Less popular webpages are unsupported, but even many of those still do not properly support retina resolutions either — e.g. not properly scaled, etc.

Currently, Apple is the only browser that is abberaant from defacto industry standard in treatment of high Hz. Likewise, there were compatibility issues back with the first retina screens, where all APIs in a broad-spectrum manner (including widely-used existing APIs that were never designed for retina-resolution intent) needs to support retina resolution screens.

The Refresh Rate Race To Retina Refresh Rates

The spatial resolution cow has been milked. 4K and retina is now cheap. Retina refresh rates will be a long progress. Just like 4K was niche, it is no longer niche. Tomorrow, 120 Hz is about to go mainstream in the 2020s. However, even 120 Hz is not the final frontier this century. Recently, NVIDIA commissioned us to create a custom TestUFO demo for the 360 Hz gaming monitor.

Even 120Hz versus 1000Hz was amazingly tested to have more human visible difference than 4K versus 8K! Some display vendors such as ASUS already has a long-term road map to 1000 Hz displays.

Not everyone realizes the benefits of future retina refresh rates. We understand why refresh rates need to increase geometrically to maintain human visible benefits. We understand all variables, such as pixel response (GtG) needing to be a tiny fraction of a refresh cycle — in order to prevent diminishing high-Hz visibility as it has historically.

Even early 120 Hz screens with 3ms GtG, diminished differences between 60 Hz vs 120 Hz, reducing human benefit. However, today, 60 Hz vs 120 Hz is much bigger on faster modern OLEDs and ultra-fast 1ms IPS.

Blur Busters has long served as an important educator in this refresh rate race. We are now more than a website — we also do services for the display and graphics industry — it is important for industry to pay attention to this new refresh rate race.