LG G4: How to Improve the Graphics in Games

The LG G4 has a setting enabled by default that improves battery life by sacrificing graphics and I’m going to show you how to disable it.

The G4 is LG’s latest and greatest but interestingly enough, the company didn’t go with the latest and greatest hardware inside it. While other OEMs are using the Snapdragon 810 alongside some LPDDR4 RAM, LG has opted for the Snapdragon 808. This means there is only 6 cores inside the SoC compared to the 8 cores that the Snapdragon 810 has.

It also means that the RAM inside the LG G4 is LPDDR3 RAM instead of the LPDDR4 RAM that we see in some other 2015 flagships. LG had good reason in opting for the Snapdragon 808 though.

The 810 has had a lot of complaints about poor performance due to some aggressive thermal throttling and this is something that LG didn’t want to deal with. The Snapdragon 810 just heats up so fast that it has to be throttled back so that it doesn’t get so hot that it shuts off. Because of this, some tests have shown the Snapdragon 808 performs better than the 810 because it stays cooler for longer. This is under high load though and isn’t for simple and quick everyday tasks. LG seems to like it this way because they’ve already worked with the Snapdragon 810(in the LG G Flex 2) and chose to not put it in the LG G4.

LG has also done some work to make the G4 more battery friendly than the G3. The display quality and the battery life were the only complaints I saw about the LG G3 when it was released. With LG’s Quantum display, they have solved those criticisms and with this graphical feature that is enabled by default. Now, disabling this feature isn’t going to make games look 1000% better, but it does show a noticeable improvement when looking at the details.

LG G4 Improve Graphics

1. Launch the Settings Application in the LG G4
2. Tap on the General Tab
3. Tap on the ‘Battery & Power Saving’ Option
4. Look in the Battery Saver Section
5. Disable the Game Optimizer Feature

Explanation

It’s interesting that LG felt the need to add in some graphical degradation in order to increase the battery life of the LG G4. Again, the differences here are not night and day so I am very, very curious to see the differences in battery life with this feature turned on and turned off. I just can’t see how this would save you more than 5% of your LG G4’s battery life. To access this feature you will need to head into the Settings of your LG G4 and then make sure you are in the General tab(or General section if you are in List View). Then you’ll want to dive into the Battery and Power Saving section of the settings.

From here, you’ll see two sections, Battery Information is at the top and then you have the Battery Saver section at the bottom. Look in the Battery Saver section at the bottom and you’ll see two features that can be toggled on and off. One of these is for the regular Battery Saver mode that was introduced in Android 5.0 Lollipop. the other is called Game Optimizer and this is actually enabled by default. Tap on it so that it is toggled off and then you can launch your game and see the graphics the way they were meant to be seen.

Here’s an example image that has been zoomed in and cropped to show you what a game looks like with this Game Optimizer featured turned on and off. As I said, it’s not a huge difference but you can see more detail in the image to the right(which is what the game looks like with the feature off .

I don’t think LG has come out and said what this feature is actually doing with the graphics. Some on /r/Android have suggested that it is rendering games at 1080p in order to increase performance. Others have suggested that LG is cutting the graphic quality completely in half(which makes it seem like it would be less than 1080p).

Either way, the idea is that LG is doing this more for performance than battery savings at all. If true, this makes me curious about why they would even put the feature in the battery saver section at all.