Sadly, no always-on 120Hz refresh for the Galaxy S20, but that may be a good thing

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Sadly, no always-on 120Hz refresh for the Galaxy S20, but that may be a good thing
We've been hearing that Samsung may double its flagship phone displays' refresh rate since last fall, when the option to switch between 60Hz and 120Hz was discovered in a hidden menu of the OneUI 2.0 beta update.

Since then, we've been on an emotional will-they-won't-they rollercoaster on the issue, especially when pertaining to the upcoming Galaxy S20 series flagships. Leaked firmware code tipped 120Hz for the Galaxy S20 displays indeed, but was subsequently dropped, at least as far as the full resolution of the displays was concerned.

Now, however, the leakster that stirred the most controversy on the matter, claiming 120Hz for all Samsung flagship phone fans, and then tipping that it may only apply at the virtual 1080p resolution that Samsung applies as default, seems to have made up their mind in the negative direction.

The Galaxy S20 series, it turns out, may have indeed ditched the option for 120Hz refresh at the full display resolution and left it for the default one that Samsung's high-end phones usually ship with out of the box, and the option switch may look like this.

Notice the warning about the negative impact on battery life from a screen constantly refreshing at 120Hz? Well, that might be one of the reasoning behind such a move by Samsung, even though the graphics subsystem still has to refresh the same physical number of pixels regardless of what the virtual resolution is. 

We'll see if this no-120Hz-at-full-resolution restriction pans out very soon, not that this is something that will bother the average user anyway. We ran a test and the uninitiated couldn't really tell the difference between 60Hz and 90Hz in regular usage though with 120Hz they might be a bit more pronounced.

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