Bad performance (CPU / FPS) on Epix Pro

But you have to admit it doesn't scroll like your phone, your tablet or any decent piece of tech with a touch screen and a list of items.

Yes, that is true, it is not smooth, it jumps from widget to widget and clicks in, on a pc I have the mouse to point and click.

I like this jumping with the haptik feedback, so I'm sure, I have picked the widget. But that has nothing to do with performance, with a better performance, all should work quicker, but for me the actual performance of my Epix Pro is good, in daily use very good ....

darktears , regarding your message: I'm not a fan, nor am I a boy.

My question on what kind of screen refresh rate you consider good enough was genuine. I've been on smartphone forums where people have stated that 90 Hz refresh rate is not adequate for their phone use, and 120 Hz is the minimum. So I just wanted to know where you put the bar. If I interpreted your message correctly, that's 60 Hz for you. And that's fine.

Also, my comment that a watch with beefier hardware could be a better choice if fast ui performance is a priority to you was not meant to be aggressive or anything. It's just an acknowledgement of the fact that different companies have different priorities when they design their products. If fast fluid user interface were a must for me, I definitely would buy a smartwatch from Apple, Samsung, or similar. For me (personally, not suggesting this to anyone else), being able to go to multi-day backpacking hikes and have offline maps, navigation, sports metrics etc. on my wrist is more important, so I ended up buying a Garmin.

Sorry for not using the appropriate gender.

I think 60hz is decent enough for a watch and that's the defacto standard for pretty much everything but smartphones. Apple watch has a 60hz display if I'm not wrong.

I'm not asking an advanced UX like Apple Watch or WearOS, if so I would have bought these products. Now the fundamentals of UX development in computer science (and I can give you a great set of books of well known authors) is that dropped frames are the enemy of a good user experience, clearly it's happening here. Junky scrolling is also referred often.

I'm not asking Garmin to revamp their UX but rather fix the *fundamentals* of the current one, especially considering that this product is one of their high end one, that similar products at a lower price point do not exhibit the issue. At 1k I can expect my notifications to be "fluid" when sliding in, especially when the Venu can do it just fine.

My non-pro Epix performs exactly the same as your watch in that video.  The issue is that the watch always finishes the "scroll" by snapping to the glance that is closest to the centre of the screen.  This is achieved by programatically scrolling up or down a bit more than the actual user input.  This additional scrolling can be quite significant (relative to the screen size) and does indeed give the impression that the UI is not responding accurately to your gesture.  And it can also cause the UI to appear laggy as there is a slight (but perceivable) delay before the programmatic scroll occurs.  

It is worse when scrolling quickly through a bunch of glances, as you demonstrate in your video.  It certainly looks as though the watch initially attempts to snap to the very next glance, then after a slight lag/delay, realises you have actually done a "big" swipe and want to do a continuous scroll and it then happily "release" the snapping and allows the glance list to scroll smoothly (until you get the snap at the end of course).

I am, like you, certain this is not a hardware issue.  It is a software/driver issue and is essentially 'by design' (not necessarily good design though).  I recall writing a hardware driver and associated UI for a challenging touch screen enabled device on a pretty old (relatively speaking) platform well over 10 years ago, and spent a lot of time working through scrolling/sensitivity issues such as this in order to end up with an overall user experience we were happy with.  

Interestingly, the watch still allows you to select any of the glances on the screen, not just the one that has been snapped to the centre, so it is not as though this behaviour is to ensure there is only one 'selectable' glance at a time.  Personally, I would prefer if all the lists (glances, settings, activities etc) just had a free-scroll feature, without any of the snapping and associated 'lag', and the glances etc would just end up at whatever position they were when you stopped scrolling - which is exactly how Gmail, for example, works on my 4+ year old Samsung Galaxy phone.  There is no attempt made to snap the emails to any certain position, they just scroll through and will quite happily allow me to have the top and bottom ones cropped vertically partway through a 'line' of text.  And the scrolling is beautiful.  The same is true on my wife's (very) old Samsung Watch (version 2 I think).  The scrolling there is flawless and a joy to use.  In fact it is more pleasurable to use than my Epix for this very reason, despite the fact it cost (new) around a quarter of the price of the Epix.  Maybe the reason for the snapping effect is to ensure that the UI remains consistent whether the buttons or touchscreen are used, as the buttons would always move the list by a 'whole' item at a time. 

At the end of the day, I can live with the scrolling performance, but I find myself quietly berating it surprisingly often, especially because I too know that the watch itself is perfectly capable of matching the scrolling performance of my phone and a very old Samsung watch.  Yes, I could buy an Apple watch etc, but that is not the point.  The point is that it is such a shame that a premium watch like the Epix (or Epix pro) is let down so badly by its UI experience when compared to other manufacturer options.  Garmin might be years ahead of the competition in their sports/navigation/fitness features (and back-end ecosystem) but they are years behind in UI/UX design and implementation.  It looks as though they have made a concerted effort with the latest batch of AMOLED devices, like my wife's Forerunner 265 for example, which all share a 'revamped' UI style, but it is really only the appearance that has changed.  The overall experience is still the same.

Bingo that’s what I said in an earlier comment in this thread. Their scroller implementation is subpar. I’m wondering if it’s not the scrollable list “widget” they use as well since the notifications appears laggy because the content slides in. This or something else, I dunno but it doesn’t feel premium.

Unfortunately, for the smoothest scrolling, you only have to use original widgets from Garmin. Likewise the watch face. And you may not use more than 1 folder :-) For scrolling, from my point of view CPU performance is limited here due to better battery life. This is also the one of key reason why Garmin devices battery life is much longer than other manufacturers.

This is one of the main reason I'm going with the Fenix 7x pro instead of the Epix pro.

Also, to be clear, this is not a bad UI implementation, this is clearly the hardware limitation related to the screen size/resolution of the Epix vs the Fenix:

Fenix has 260x260 or 280x280 pixel screen for the 7 or the 7x, where the Epix has a 416x416 or 454x454 screen for the 47 or the 51mm size.

That makes almost 4x the amount of pixel to move, it's not going to be fluid just working on the UI if it’s not supported by more cpu/gpu power, period.

Any discussion about refresh rate is frankly pointless, the problem here is that the experience is not smooth, that has nothing to do with what refresh rate should be. It could even be 200hz, but if it drops dramaticaly while using the watch, that’s only means a bad experience. A slower but consistent frame rate would be better, but in this watch it's not going to happen, since AFAIK the hardware is the same as the Fenix.

That's probably also the reason of the many crashes and reboots people have while scrolling too fast or just looking at the notifications, usually while using the touch screen (buttons are not fast enough).

Btw this problem also affect the overall reactivity of the watch, there are instance where, while the Fenix is super fast (as it should be), the Epix takes like 3 or more second to react, like entering the activity menu or starting an activity, for example.

I don't want to sound rude, but any attempt to find a justification for this on a 1000€+ watch means you deserve your sluggish watch.

All my widgets and apps are reacting in less than 0.5 seconds on my epix pro, same as starting an activity ...