DraStic

Hello, my name is Advanthrax, It's nice to meet you.
I've opened this new topic because Drastic has a quite strange behavior on my phone.
My smartphone, a Huawei P9, should be enough powerful to run games at 100% fps, no fs and hi-res 3D redering:
-64-bit 8 cores CPU (4x Cortex A72 @2.5GHz + 4x Cortex A53 @1.8GHz);
-Mali T880-MP4 (4 cores) GPU @900MHz (122.4 GFLOPS);
-3GB of RAM;
-Android 6.0 32-bit mode (EMUI 4.1).

Yet, there are noticeable slowdowns or speed-up, the rendering is not smooth.
I'm consistently running at ~103% fps and there are hiccups with all graphic options turned on as well as turned off. Audio latency doesn't change anything too. I've also set the count of usable threads to 4 (max) but nothing change.
I'm feeling hopeless as I've read that Drastic has an expensive use of the NEON instruction set, of which the HiSilicon Kirin 955 processor of my smartphone lacks.
So, I post today, trying to know if there is any solution to this quite strange but irritating behavior?

I'm not sure I understand the issue you're describing. You're saying the FPS counter always reads 103%, but you notice slowdowns and speed-ups? Are you sure you don't see fluctuations in the percentage? I wouldn't expect it to not be smooth if the percentage is stable, although 103% is too high and that could be the cause of occasionally slowing down to compensate.

Your CPUs support NEON without issue, I don't know where you read otherwise, but this should not be a factor at all.

Things like this could be due to power management on the phone being unstable, especially if it causes threads to bounce between the A72s and A53s. Or, there could be something in the background that's occasionally stealing CPU time. If you can it would be helpful to run some kind of CPU/core usage monitoring app to see how this is fluctuating. It could also be helpful to try forcibly shutting down as many background apps as you can to see if this makes a difference.

Normally I recommend keeping auto-frameskip on, even if the device is generally powerful enough, unless it breaks the game. It can perform better speed regulation in some cases, and there could be unexpected slowdowns even if the CPU is fast, for instance if the games suddenly loads a lot of data from the cartridge.

Finally, a few games are just really demanding, and even really high end hardware can't sustain full speed and hires rendering and no frameskip 100% of the time. What games are you running? Have you seen the same behavior across several?