Hello, this is something that I've observed consistently throughout the current iOS 26 beta cycle and I haven't seen much discussion around it online. Therefore I'm wondering if this is an issue isolated to a small subset of unlucky users, including myself, or perhaps an overlooked widespread problem that deserves a bit more visibility.
The core of the issue is this - when playing video games, they no longer seem to consistently run at their native frame rates and often get into pretty significant episodes of stuttering/frame drops. The frame rate drops by as much as 30-50% for as long as 10 seconds at a time.
This happens during normal gameplay and I can't see it being tied to any specific game, or any specific action within that game, or any configurable game setting. An easy way to reproduce this issue for me is to just minimize the game to the background and then bring it back to the front - this will immediately trigger the issue 8 times out of 10.
Obviously, I can't speak for all games and devices out there, but I did try more than one combination of each before posting this. As far as games go, I tried this with Pokemon Go and Pokemon TCGP. For devices, I tried it with an iPhone 14 Pro and an iPad Mini 7. I've never seen behavior like this before on iOS 18.
I've tried the following, which does not resolve the issue:
I understand that I'm running beta software here, which may come with bugs and suboptimal performance, but I think seeing an issue of this severity (at least for me) and this far down the beta cycle seems rather concerning to me.
So I'm wondering - what are you guys seeing? Are your games running just fine?
The core of the issue is this - when playing video games, they no longer seem to consistently run at their native frame rates and often get into pretty significant episodes of stuttering/frame drops. The frame rate drops by as much as 30-50% for as long as 10 seconds at a time.
This happens during normal gameplay and I can't see it being tied to any specific game, or any specific action within that game, or any configurable game setting. An easy way to reproduce this issue for me is to just minimize the game to the background and then bring it back to the front - this will immediately trigger the issue 8 times out of 10.
Obviously, I can't speak for all games and devices out there, but I did try more than one combination of each before posting this. As far as games go, I tried this with Pokemon Go and Pokemon TCGP. For devices, I tried it with an iPhone 14 Pro and an iPad Mini 7. I've never seen behavior like this before on iOS 18.
I've tried the following, which does not resolve the issue:
- hard device restart.
- killing all apps in the background, turning off background refresh,
- turning on/off ProMotion,
- enabling the Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion setting, as well as the Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions below it,
- enabling/disabling low power mode
- enabling/disabling game mode,
- reinstalling the games.
I understand that I'm running beta software here, which may come with bugs and suboptimal performance, but I think seeing an issue of this severity (at least for me) and this far down the beta cycle seems rather concerning to me.
So I'm wondering - what are you guys seeing? Are your games running just fine?