Prime performance is still abysmal on many devices. Animations need to be toggleable!
It's seriously been a few months since I, and many others, have pointed out that ingress prime runs on either a low or high performance mode on different devices at seemingly random for many. For instance, on the Moto G6 and G5, phones with not the best hardware, prime decides "Hey, let's push the GPU to the limit because I can, not because I should," causing the framerate to often dip well below 10 FPS, often to 5 or even 0! This performance is also exhibited, to name a few devices also afflicted, on the Galaxy S7, S6, S5, Oneplus 3, 3T, 5, Nexus 5X, etc. Phones with fingerprint sensors running OSes ranging from 6.0-9.0 Android. I'm certain this issue also affects ios devices as well.
Devs, please acknowledge that prime cannot be handled by the GPUs inside many of these phones. They make up most of the market, because few of us really need to upgrade past what they offer right now. Their battery lasts the whole day, they have a fingerprint sensor and their Android is recent enough for almost everything. People shouldn't need to upgrade their phone because an app that HAS a low performance mode will not offer it to them. Please change this and give all users the option to fully enable or disable low performance mode at will. This issue is deterring somewhere over a hundred agents from moving off redacted, because the app just cannot run on their devices in a usable fashion. My Anomaly team can't even all use it, so half of my team will have to use redacted during myriad just to play because of this very issue.
Comments
True, that is the only reason i haven't switched to prime, when im around a couple portals performance is ok, when i go to farm AP in a highly dense area its almost impossible to play due the framerate (4-10 fps) and my phone runs other niantic apps at high fps in te same places, there's a lot to be desired in performance aspects.
There should be an option to switch high and low performance modes and improve them.
I'd love to see a choice between:
1. High quality graphics with animations
2. High quality graphics with no animations
3. Low quality graphics with animations
4. Low quality graphics with no animations
If the animations are needed to pace out gameplay flow, then they can be replaced with simpler versions, such as an expanding solid ring for bursters or even just a row of dots or a 3-2-1 like glyphing.
I realize that most games pride themselves on their lush graphics but Ingress is different, as players are out in the real world taking many more actions than in games like PoGo and HPWU. Nobody is going to be playing Wizards Unite on a satellite modem, I'd hope. Nobody hikes 14 miles to take over a Pokemon Go gym in an area with iffy signal. People don't buy low-cost second devices to have a backup for Pokemon if their phone overheats. (And yes there was a field that only went up because I was carrying my junky old tablet.)
We must at least be able to select high or low graphics mode. Given there's already an internal toggle for this and it doesn't always get it right, why shouldn't we have that option in device settings?
Yes this could help weaker phones, like many mobile games etc, u can chose graphic settings, low , medium high etc... not fun having prime open and it sucks battery very fast and makes many phones go overheat because its a cpu and ram hog usage..
That's true. We need a option.
I definitely agree on you. Niantic should allow agents to have more control on the customization of their own scanner.
Samsung Xcover 3 here. Yes, that may be on the lower end (1,7G memory) but even runs pokemon quite fine. But prime switches to low resolution mode which makes portals just not to be seen on the scanner.
So yes, please make an option to switch between hi-resolution and low-resolution. The guessing from prime doesn't seem to work very well.
#RIPbroot