Pixel 9 finally gets adaptive refresh rate support in Android 15 QPR1

Google just announced the December 2024 Pixel Drop, and it brings a raft of features to Pixel phones, Pixel smartwatches, and the Pixel Tablet. We’ve already thoroughly documented all the new features and improvements that Google shared, but there’s one change that we didn’t anticipate. With the new update, Google’s latest Pixel phones are getting support for adaptive refresh rate.

Alongside a blog post, Google shares a handy chart on its support forums that lists the feature availability by device for every Pixel Drop. Today’s Pixel Drop release is no different, of course, and in the feature availability chart that Google shared today, we noticed that Google listed “adaptive refresh rate” as a feature exclusive to the Google Pixel 9 series.

That might sound odd to many of you, as you might assume the Pixel 9 series already supported adaptive refresh rate, but as we recently pointed out, support for adaptive refresh rate was actually just added in the Android 15 update. Yes, Android hasn’t supported adaptive refresh rate until Android 15.

Before Android 15, the operating system did support multiple refresh rates via refresh rate switching, which basically means the operating system tells the display to switch between various display modes. While the OS tries to do this switching intelligently, the end result was never as seamless as true adaptive refresh rate, which involves the refresh rate adapting to the frame rate of content without needing to change display modes.

The benefit of adaptive refresh rate is that it reduces power consumption by allowing devices to run at refresh rates lower than their maximums, only transitioning to higher refresh rates when necessary to improve the user experience. That’s something that was already somewhat achieved by the old refresh rate switching method, but one consequence of the old method is that it caused jank, i.e. perceptible lag. Since adaptive refresh rate eliminates the need to change display modes, there’s no longer any jank when the refresh rate changes.

As I explained in my original article on Android 15’s adaptive refresh rate feature, OEMs have to not only support the requisite kernel and system-level changes but also implement a new version of the Hardware Composer hardware abstraction layer (HAL). While the Google Pixel 7 and later implement the required version of the HWC HAL, it seems like only the Pixel 9 series on the latest Pixel Drop release has all the changes necessary to fully enable adaptive refresh rate support.

So if you update your Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, or Pixel 9 Pro Fold to the latest Pixel Drop release based on Android 15 QPR1, you might notice a reduction in how much the display consumes power, as well as a reduction in jank when it switches between refresh rates.