The developer who unlocked 90Hz on the Pixel 6A needs help finishing the project

The developer who unlocked 90Hz on the Pixel 6A needs help finishing the project

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Remember that Pixel 6A mod that unlocks a 90Hz refresh rate? Well, the developer behind it, Nathan Brooke (aka Lunarixus), just made the changes public in hopes that other developers can finish off the tweak.

In a post on Twitter, Brooke includes a link to the project on GitHub and says that he just doesn’t have enough time to work on it. The mod activates a seemingly untapped 90Hz refresh rate on the budget-friendly Pixel 6A, which would otherwise ship with a 6.1-inch OLED display running at 60Hz. While The Verge’s senior editor, Sean Hollister, confirmed that the mod does work, there are a few caveats.

Note: Green tint is not fixed, this is why we never released it officially, you won't notice green tint on max and lowest brightness, only in the middle, my hope is other devs can figure out how to overwrite the gamma table and finish this off, the rest is stable.

— Nathan (@TheLunarixus) December 10, 2022

For one, some users report seeing a green tint on their displays when trying the mod, but that’s something Brooke and his team hope other developers can fix. “The screen tints the exact way high refresh rate OLED panels do when they’re not correctly calibrated,” Brooke tells The Verge. “I know it is fully possible to overwrite these tables but I don’t have the time to work on it myself so I open-sourced the driver edits so that other developers can work on it.“ Brooke adds that you shouldn’t notice the green tint when the display is on the max or lowest brightness; the problem persists when it’s set in the middle.

The process of installing the mod is still pretty complicated, and if you do actually get it to work, we don’t know whether running the higher refresh rate affects the device. It’s still not clear whether the 90Hz option is software locked, or if the mod just overclocks the device, something developer Kuba Wojciechowski pointed out on Twitter a couple of months back. The Verge reached out to Google to see if the Pixel 6A’s display really does support 90Hz, and we’ll update this article if we hear back.

Hopefully, we’ll get some solid information about any possible effects on the device once more developers start diving in. Brooke tells The Verge that developers will eventually “be able to release their own kernels with improved versions” of the driver, so we’ll just have to stay tuned for a finished product.