How to Improve Mobile Gaming Performance and Battery Life on Android

As mobile games become more sophisticated and their graphics are better and more powerful, smartphones require higher hardware specs to make these games look great. Whether your smartphone is new or showing a little age, you can probably achieve higher frame rates. Change the display settings of your phone or tablet and you can get better performance in graphics-intensive games and apps, and maybe even save some battery life.

There are several ways to do this. The easiest is to change the resolution settings in your device’s settings menu, however this option is only available on some Android devices and only allows you to switch to preset screen resolutions. For some apps or games, your settings won’t even matter.

For those who want to lower their resolution or DPI settings more than their system settings allow, or who don’t have the option to do so in their phone settings from the get-go, there are a number of apps on the Google Play store that let you change the screen resolution right away, though this will require rooting the phone. The problem is that a number of new games (online or offline) will not load on rooted devices, making this option available to players of games like Pokémon Go, Fortnite or PUBG Mobile.

Fortunately, there is a third option that allows you to change your device’s screen resolution without the need for root access.

How to change the screen resolution of an Android device without root

First, you need to download and install Android Debug Bridge on your computer, and we have a quick guide if you haven’t already.

After installation, you will need to put your phone into developer mode. Developer Mode lets you tweak deeper system-level settings on your phone, but all we have to do is enable USB debugging. How simple it is.

1. Go to Settings> About , then scroll down and tap the build number about 7-10 times in a row. You will receive a notification when you enable development mode.
2. Now go to Settings> System> Advanced> Developer options . Scroll down to Debug and enable USB Debugging .

As a side note, if you are doing this to improve performance in Fortnite , be sure to disable USB debugging and developer mode after editing your display settings, as Fortnite (and many other online games) will block you from entering matches if these settings are enabled. To turn off Developer Mode, go to Settings> System> Advanced> Developer Options , then tap on the banner at the top to turn it off.

Connect your phone and change its display settings.

1. Connect the USB cable to charge your phone to your computer.
2. Launch Command Prompt on your PC. In Windows, press Windows Key + R , then type “cmd” and press Enter. On a Mac, press Command + Spacebar , then search for Terminal. For Linux users, press Ctrl + Alt + T.
3. Enter “adb shell dumpsys display” in the command line and press Enter.
4. Find the DPI value ( wm density ) and your phone’s display resolution ( wm size or display width and height ). Write these numbers down so you can revert to your original display in the future.
5. Now you can start editing the resolution and DPI. This will depend on the phone. Use this chart to find your phone’s native resolution and zoom in or out from there (if you are using a device with a resolution of 1920×1080, downscaling to 1280×720 is fine). It is not easy to change DPI, but native DPI values ​​should usually be between 120 and 640 for most phones. It can take trial and error to find a readable DPI, but as long as you stick to the 120 to 640 range, you’ll find it.
6. Enter “wm density [new resolution ]” at the command line and press Enter to change the DPI, and “wm size [new resolution]” to change the resolution. You should see this happening automatically on your device.
7. When finished, enter “adb reboot” to reboot your Android device and safely disconnect it from your computer.

I tested the above steps with Pokemon Go on my original Google Pixel XL, as changing display settings is generally the recommended way to improve game performance among the gaming community. Before changing the resolution, I had good game performance, but there was a noticeable improvement in smoothness when loading and fighting in gyms, or when navigating through game menu screens. I didn’t measure any difference in frame rates, but it was better nonetheless – and the difference is probably even more obvious on older (less powerful) phones.

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