Google Delivers Promised Smooth Display Improvements for Pixel 4

Google’s new Pixel 4 devices launched with a major new feature called Smooth Display that allows the display to operate at refresh rates of 90Hz. There was a catch, though: because of the small batteries on both the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, Google couldn’t afford to make the display run at 90Hz all the time.

And so, the company made Smooth Display work only in certain conditions, like when the content on your display doesn’t need to have higher refresh rates. Smooth Display switches to 60Hz when you are watching videos, or when you have the battery saver turned on. But as users found out last month, Smooth Display on the Pixel 4 devices was also switching back to 60Hz in some brightness and ambient conditions. The display would automatically switch to 60Hz as soon as the brightness level of the display was turned down below 75%, or in under some other ambient conditions.

Google was quick to promise a software update to fix the issue last month, and the company has started rolling that new update out. As 9to5Google reports, there’s a new Pixel 4 update that introduces “Smooth Display improvements”, possibly allowing the Smooth Display’s 90Hz refresh rates to work in “more brightness conditions” as Google promised last month. The changelog doesn’t provide details on exactly what’s improved, so we can’t really tell if the issues from last month have been fixed.

The new updates to the Pixel 4 also come with some camera quality improvements and additional support for Xbox controller mapping.