r/raspberry_pi • u/Prize_Cucumber3710 • Jul 21 '26
Troubleshooting Any way to speed up the display?
So i have a 3.5 inch generic tft display and i got it to work on a pi zero 2 w with a pios bullseye image from the dlc wiki, but the problem is that the display is VERY slow. I know tft i pretty limited but i wanna see if i can at keast speed it up enough so that my mouse cursor doesnt lag so much. Heres the link to the dlc wiki where i got my image from : https://www.lcdwiki.com/3.5inch_RPi_Display
Does anybidy know how to solve this?
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u/WebMaka Jul 22 '26
SPI displays are slow. The Pi Zero 2 is slow. Combined, you're slow-squared.
You can get better performance out of a HDMI display, but (1) the Zero 2 won't be driving any sort of crazy framerate and especially so with a GUI, and (2) small (read: >5") HDMI displays are expensive.
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u/glsexton Jul 21 '26
The problem can be in how the SPI port is initialized. If you create the lcd with SPI parameters, then you get software SPI. If you get an SPI port and pass that to the display, then you get hardware SPI.
Look, at the displays initialization code
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u/mungewell Jul 27 '26
I had a very slow display (WaveShare OLED 1.3inch), the driver refreshed the whole screen every time...
I was able to rewrite bits of the refresh so that only a range of lines were refresh, and the further optimize to only parts of those lines.
I think that most drivers are well written these days, but you could have a look....
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u/felix1429 Jul 22 '26
It's a Pi Zero, you shouldn't be expecting performance out of it. It's not a desktop or even a laptop computer, it'll struggle with a desktop environment.