What are you trying to achieve with your running?

I’m not sure whether you’re trying to be helpful, or just trolling me, but since I suspect it’s the latter, I’m not going to bother responding. I just want to find which watches, or footpod, people have found give consistent and fairly accurate instantaneous pace. I knew I shouldn’t have sold my 920 when I gave up tri!

It is interesting that you completely edited/changed your response to me.

Swimming, biking, and running isn't about the electronic devices that you can use.

Enjoying the effort and feeling the flow is very rewarding. My 18 and 16 year old sons have been riding with me the past year or so and are discovering that a simple chronometer is a great way to keep in touch with their effort. A hard effort from a stoplight to the next stoplight (or a 20 mile time trial) has become fairly easy for them to guess what the time will be. They don't have power meters or any type of bike computer, just a watch on their wrist. Turn the chronometer on, cover it up with a piece of tape, and guess what the time will be when you are almost to the end.

It does become more difficult to guess the time when we are working in a rotating paceline and going a bit faster than normal.

I completely edited my response because there seemed little point in further derailing this train wreck of a thread. I just wanted an answer to a simple question.

For you, swimming, biking and running isn’t about devices. That’s awesome. For someone else, it may be, and that’s awesome too.

Also, please don’t make assumptions about my use of devices and whether or not I can find flow. I know how to find flow - mountain biking for me, mostly. But I also know when to use a specific device for a specific purpose to attain a specific goal. You do you, as they say. And that’s exactly why I edited my first response. I shouldn’t have bothered biting the first time, but that’s on me.

I asked a simple question, or so I thought, and we’ve wasted a whole day going round and round in circles.

Redirecting this back to the OP's Q...I have 920xt and find the instance pace by GPS pretty 'laggy' - i.e it takes some time to correctly report pace after a pace change. A perfect example is constant speed workout interrupted by a traffic signal. It seems like the pace returns to expectation after 60 sec or so - a pretty long time, it seems to me. Like others, I find the pace responsiveness of the Garmin footpod to be pretty good - better than the GPS-based pace. But there are clear differences in GPS pace among models - I have a old 305 that works fine. With the 305 on one arm and the 920 on the other, the instant pace on the 305 is much more responsive. Why? Better algorithm? Seems unlikely - you are taking the difference among GPS coordinates to estimate distance and dividing by the time between locations. The time stamp ought to be perfect and equal among devices. So...the GPS precision is less good in modern devices? That seems wrong, unless there are design specs that force this to occur - lower frequency GPS location recordings, less GPS precision due to power saving...I don't know. Different GPS chipsets (that's certain, but how does that impact instant pace?)? I've often wondered about all of this as the 920 GPS instant pace is irritating...