Realme has made quite the progress in making smartphones that gives a run for its money – it’s a fact we can’t deny. The last time we got to take a look at a Realme phone was the 5 – it was a great one. In just a short span of time the brand unveiled their new Realme 6 – which claims to offer the best specification for barely a thousand ringgit. Now that the phone is out and about – I was just waiting for other amazing content creators to post up their reviews to see how the phone is.
Up until today, there isn’t a single review up and we have no idea what’s going on even when the phone is already available for purchase for a week. Considering the fact that it does have quite the hype and was widely anticipated, we went ahead and got our hands on a Realme 6 during the sale they had and try the phone’s one and only hyped up feature – the 90Hz display just because there was an interesting flaw going on. Let’s start.
The Backstory of that 90Hz
There are a lot of brands that has been emphasizing on this whole High Refresh Rate on smartphones. That said, Realme is the only phone currently in the market to offer a High Refresh at a price that’s lower than a grand (< RM 1000), which is fantastic but there were numerous post about how the display isn’t 90fps at all on Facebook group – like the one below. Take note, it was on the Realme 6 Pro, which isn’t officially available in Malaysia and Realme has postponed the release to a later day. So, we tested this with the 6 instead.
The UFO Test is one of the ways we try to see if the display is capable of living up to the FPS it says it would. This is where the whole drama kicks in.
Realme 6 90Hz Display: Judgement Day
To give a little context behind UFO test, it’s one of those gold-standard-ish test to look for FPS and if it can keep up. But thing is, this particular test is not a good test to go with. We tried and it constantly gave us warning that the V-Sync wasn’t enabled. We scratched this off the table. So, we proceeded with the only other test – real time refresh rates in games. There are quite the number of games out there which supports 90Hz refresh rate and we chose the following: Vainglory, Temple Run and Subway Surfers. Weirdly, the Realme 6 cant can’t go past the 60Hz mark. The only place where you can see the phone working on 90Hz is scrolling through the homescreen and flipping through socials – I am sure users didnt buy the phone just for this.
Conveniently enough, I personally use the ASUS ROG Phone as my daily driver. It’s only fair to put it head on with another fellow 90Hz display. We do have the Samsung Galaxy S20, S20+, ROG Phone II and Oppo Find X2 Pro but its not fair because those are well above 90Hz. We downloaded the Oppo Game Space onto my ROG Phone and put it to test: Vainglory, Subway Surfers and Temple Run. Just as expected, the phone ran at 90Hz. I don’t know about you guys, but I have a lot of questions.
Conclusion: What’s going on?
I was skeptical because what if the processor is bottle necking the display. But if that was really the case, why even include a 90Hz display and claim that it has a Smooth 90Hz display. I know they have another phone – the Realme X2 Pro which has a 90Hz display and runs a flagship grade processor, I don’t know how that turned out – whether it’s capped at 60Hz or managed to output at 90Hz. At this point, we can only assume that the X2 Pro gives the same result as the Realme 6 but honestly, I am really disappointed.
Realme has some serious explanation that they need to do to consumers and us rather than misleading users with marketing jargon. If you are reading this, don’t get us the wrong way, we still love what you do but a little explanation goes a long way. I am not too sure about the Realme 6 Pro, but looking at content all over the place where it says it also rocks a 90Hz display, I wouldn’t be surprised that if that device is capped at 60fps as well.
Every brand in the past has made some kind of mistakes but they have won consumers heart by owning up to it – I am talking about brands like the Korean giants and more. I do not know what’s going on with this smartphone but what I can tell is – users to be careful when you fall for a marketing trap. For now, I’d say the Realme 6 display isn’t a true 90Hz display and it’s bogged down by something mysterious for all we know.
This brings up another question: Does higher refresh rate even matter and a feature that make a difference?
We will talk about that in another article. In the meantime, you can read about how MediaTek Processors faked the Benchmark scores recently. – Very saucy.
