The first-ever smartphone which was a “gaming phone” launched with a 90Hz display which was IPS but that was unheard of in a smartphone at that time. We believed that higher refresh rate panels were only possible on gaming monitors and TVs. However, Android phone manufacturers showed that it was possible and now we have AMOLED panels with 120Hz refresh rate as well.
So Asus, which runs one of the best gaming brands in the market known as ROG or republic of gamers, launched their third iteration of the popular ROG Phone named as the ROG Phone 3.
The major difference with the ROG Phone 3 is that it has a 144Hz IPS LCD display which is the first time we are seeing such a high refresh rate panel on any phone because the highest we have gone so far is with 120Hz OLED on OnePlus 8 Pro and others.
But what if we told you that 144Hz is not the maximum refresh rate you can get out of the Asus ROG Phone 3, well you will call us crazy for sure. The reason being that even Asus advertises their phone to support a max of 144Hz refresh rate. But there has been a hidden setting found out inside the Asus ROG Phone 3 by crazy minds over at XDA-Developers that can enable the 160Hz refresh rate on this device.
First of all, let us appreciate the engineering marvel to support a higher refresh rate than what the phone even supports just by a line of code. If you want to enable the hidden 160Hz mode on your Asus ROG Phone 3, you will need to enable ADB on your PC and then run a single command from your CMD on the PC.
Here is the command:
adb shell setprop debug.vendor.asus.fps.eng 1Once the command has been sent to the device, you need to reboot the device and on booting up, you will see that 160Hz refresh rate switching can be seen on your device’s Settings>Display>Refresh Rate.
We believe that going from 144Hz to 160Hz would not make a major difference and we are doubtful if anyone is even going to notice it but if we can take the full advantage of a display then why not.
Having said that, we believe there is a reason why Asus did not advertise their phone having a 160Hz refresh rate which might be due to battery concerns or something else so it is important to not use the device at this refresh rate all the time.
To go back to 144Hz refresh rate, you can switch it from the Settings directly but if you want to disable this 160Hz mode then you can also do it just like you enabled it from CMD by a command. To disable this mode, the command will be tweaked just a little bit:
adb shell setprop debug.vendor.asus.fps.eng 0