Google Pixel 8 Pro - Why?

The Pixel 8 Pro is Googles latest flagship. It has tons of cool AI features built in, a "guaranteed" 7 OS update support, and some pretty great cameras for those that like point and shoot. The device started out with 480 hz as documented on a few reddit sites, but then after an update decreased the PWM rate. If the display is capable of a higher PWM rate, why wouldn't google use it? Maybe Google Gemini knows....

At 75% brightness the Google Pixel 8 Pro, shows a low PWM flicker rate of 246 hz, which is already off to a bad start. The modulation depth, while narrower than other devices, is still low at 99.5%. You can see the dips in the modulation go all the way to off for a small period, different than some other devices which just go to almost zero but never hit it.

At 50% brightness it gets even worse. It seams Google is being incredibly lazy with their programming and just decreases the entire modulation wave by whatever decrease you do with the brightness, no modification of it, they just keep the same wave and move the whole thing down. You can see the wave at 50% looks the same as 75%, but they just lowered the whole thing, so we see it spends even more time at zero. A good analogy for understanding this would be dipping a donut down in coffee. At 75% your just dipping the tip of the donut down in the coffee, then at 50% you got about 25% of the donut in the coffee. (now i want a donut) (and some eye drops).

At 25% its awful. Just plain awful. They now took the donut we talked about above and cut the sides off of it and put it about 10% deeper. The flicker rate remains the same as 246 hz, but the modulation rate is eye bleeding bad. I am in the middle of a pixel 7 pro test as well at the time and it doesn't look like google made any improvements from the pixel 7 pro. For me this is frustrating, because the device is perfectly capable of 480 hz (and higher), but google chooses the lower flicker rate. I don't know why.... but we're the ones that suffer from it. As a fan of their earlier devices all I can say is "Google, WHY?!".