D-VSync: Decoupled Rendering and Displaying for Smartphone Graphics

Rendering service, which typically orchestrates screen display and UI through Vertical Synchronization (VSync), is an indispensable system service for user experiences of smartphone OSes (e.g., Android, OpenHarmony, and iOS). The recent trend of large high-frame-rate screens, stunning visual effects, and physics-based animations has placed unprecedented pressure on the VSync-based rendering architecture, leading to higher frame drops and longer rendering latency.

This paper proposes Decoupled Vertical Synchronization (D-VSync), which decouples execution and displaying in the rendering service. D-VSync allows frames to be rendered a number of VSync periods before being physically displayed on the screen. The key insight behind D-VSync to resolve the limitation of VSync is that, the decoupling enables sporadic