Unlock 90/120 FPS on Android & iPhone

These two numbers get mixed up constantly, so it is worth separating them. Refresh rate is a property of your screen: how many times per second the panel can redraw itself, measured in hertz (60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz). Frame rate is a property of the game: how many unique images per second it actually produces, measured in FPS. They are different things, and smoothness only happens when both are high together. A 120Hz screen showing a game locked to 60 FPS looks like 60. A game rendering 120 FPS on a 60Hz screen only shows you 60 of those frames — the rest are thrown away.

That leads to the rule that governs everything else here. To see high frame rates in motion, three conditions must all be true at once. First, the display must be set to a high refresh rate. Second, the game must offer a high-FPS mode and you must turn it on. Third, the phone's chip must be powerful enough to sustain that frame rate without throttling. Miss any one of the three and you fall back to whatever the weakest link allows. This is why two people with the same game can have wildly different experiences — one has all three lined up, the other is quietly capped at 60 by a single overlooked setting.

It also explains why there is no magic switch. A 'booster' app cannot add hertz your panel does not have, and it cannot lift a cap the developer wrote into the game. The honest work is making sure your display is not sitting at 60 out of the box, the game's high-FPS tier is actually selected, and your hardware can keep up. The rest of this guide is those three jobs, in order.

Start with the screen, because if the panel is running at 60Hz nothing else matters. On Android this lives in Settings, usually under Display, as an option called 'Refresh Rate' or 'Smooth display' (Samsung calls the high mode 'Adaptive', OnePlus and others use 'High'). Many phones ship set to 'Auto' or 'Adaptive', which lets the phone ramp between low and high refresh depending on what is on screen. For most people Auto is genuinely fine — it hits high refresh in games and drops down to save battery on static screens. But some phones also expose a forced-high option, and if you want to remove any doubt during gaming, select that.

iPhone is simpler and stricter. The Pro models (iPhone 13 Pro and newer Pro/Pro Max) have a 120Hz display Apple calls ProMotion, and it is on automatically — there is no setting to enable and nothing to configure. Standard, non-Pro iPhones are locked to 60Hz at the hardware level. There is no menu, no toggle, and no unlock, official or otherwise, that raises a standard iPhone above 60Hz. If you are on a regular iPhone, 60 FPS is your ceiling for display smoothness, full stop, and that is not a limitation any app can remove.

One caveat worth knowing: on some Android phones, high refresh rate and the highest screen resolution are mutually exclusive, or battery-saver mode will force the panel back down to 60Hz. If your high refresh rate setting seems to be ignored, check that you are not in a power-saving mode and that a resolution setting is not overriding it.

A fast screen does nothing if the game is still rendering 60 frames. Every game handles this differently, and the key rule that trips people up is this: you usually have to LOWER graphics quality before the game will even let you SELECT the higher frame-rate tiers. High detail and high frame rate compete for the same chip; developers gate the top FPS options behind lower visual settings on purpose, because the hardware cannot do both at once. So the winning move is almost always to drop graphics quality first, then the high-FPS option unlocks.

The common ones: In PUBG Mobile, set Graphics to 'Smooth' (low) and the Frame Rate slider will open up 'Extreme' and 'Extreme+' tiers — the highest FPS options only appear at lower graphics. Call of Duty: Mobile has a 'Max' frame rate setting that, again, pairs with lower graphics quality. Genshin Impact offers a '60 FPS' toggle in its graphics menu (it does not go above 60 on mobile). League of Legends: Wild Rift has a frame-rate setting with 'High' and 'Ultra' options, hardware permitting. The pattern is identical across all of them: find the frame-rate control, and expect to trade some visual fidelity to reach the top tier.

Do not overlook the game's own cap. Some titles simply do not offer anything above 60 FPS on mobile no matter what phone you own — that is a developer decision, and no setting on your end changes it. Before hunting for a phantom 120 mode, confirm the game actually supports one. If the highest option the game offers is 60, then 60 is your answer for that title.

Reaching a high frame rate for the first minute of play is easy; holding it is the hard part. Phones are thermally limited. A slim handset with no active cooling can hit 120 FPS while it is cool, then throttle the chip down as heat builds — dropping you to 90, then 70, then bouncing around. That fluctuation is what actually makes gameplay feel bad. Stutter and inconsistency register far more strongly to your eyes than a slightly lower but steady number.

This is why the pros do not always chase the maximum. A rock-solid, locked 60 FPS that never wavers usually feels smoother and plays better than a 90 that constantly sags and spikes under thermal load. If your phone can genuinely sustain 90 or 120, wonderful — use it. But if it only holds the top tier for a couple of minutes before throttling, step down one tier to something it can maintain for a full match. Consistency is the goal, not the peak number.

You can buy yourself headroom with basic thermal management: take the phone out of a thick case while gaming, keep it off wireless charging (which generates heat), play somewhere cool rather than in direct sun, and consider a clip-on cooler or one of the phones with a built-in fan if you play long sessions. None of this raises your ceiling, but it delays throttling so you hold your chosen frame rate longer. Set a realistic cap you can sustain, then help the phone stay under it.

Do not assume — measure. After changing display and in-game settings, you want to confirm the game is really running at the frame rate you selected, and that it holds there under load. The good news is there are several honest ways to see the real number without installing anything sketchy.

Some games have a built-in FPS counter in their settings or a developer/debug option — turn it on and it draws the current frame rate right on screen. Beyond that, most phone makers ship a game toolbar or game mode (Samsung Game Booster, the various 'Game Space' and gaming-mode overlays on other brands) that includes a live FPS readout you can pin while playing. There are also reputable performance-overlay tools in the GameBench style that display FPS, and on Android you can enable an on-screen refresh-rate indicator in Developer Options to confirm the panel itself is running high. iOS is more locked down, but Pro-model owners can trust that ProMotion is active, and in-game counters still work.

When you check, look at two things: the number and its stability. Confirm it matches the tier you selected in the game, and then play a genuinely demanding moment — a firefight, a busy team battle — and watch whether it holds or collapses. If it holds, you are done and everything is lined up. If it sags hard, that is your signal to drop one frame-rate tier or improve cooling, then re-verify. Measuring closes the loop and tells you which of the three conditions still needs attention.