So recently I got a new Android phone, the LG Lucid 2, and it was a free phone for a 2 year contract, so not a high end phone per se. However, the phone's specs actually surprise me for being a low end model; it has a dual core 1.5GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, and a GPU (I forget which) that supposedly rates only a tad under the GPU of the Tegra 3. Despite this, games, namely 3D games perform pretty poorly. The games tend to stutter rather badly, but I have pretty good reason the believe the GPU is fine as the framerate is pretty smooth in between stuttering sessions. It would seem to me as if the stuttering occurs most intensively when loading terrain and such, but the stuttering never fully goes away. Even apps with very simple terrain such as Minecraft and especially Temple Run, which generates incredibly simple terrain, both stutter awfully. My iPad 2 runs both of those apps incredibly smoothly, and that's a much less powerful platform. Some benchmarks even rate the phone above the Nexus 7 in terms of performance, and I know the Nexus 7 is pretty good.
I turned on CPU monitoring, and a process known as surface flinger was rather consistently getting about twice the processing time as the process used by the game being played. Occasionally, surface flinger's CPU usage would go below the main process's, but I noticed really no correlation between that and the performance. Upon research I found that process was mainly responsible for copying images from the back buffer to the screen, so I'd expect it to get quite a bit of usage during games. However, most other people do not report having such high usage of the CPU by that process, and do not report such stuttering issues.
I also figured it could be an issue with the phone's storage being slow, so I did a test and got quite low results, 0.34MB/s random write speed being the worst, but other people seems to report similar results. Not to mention, with 1GB RAM, no app really should be paging like that anyway... Also I don't believe Android even allows for paging.
So really,I have no clue what is going on here and if anyone has any ideas as to the cause of this or a way to fix it, I'd be incredibly appreciative!
And a note, the phone seems to stutter during some 2D things as well, just not as bad, but I have experienced some pretty bad stuttering when scrolling in menus and such. In such scenarios, surface flinger has pretty low usage.
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