14 ms·

LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life

320 points by robotnikman 7mo ago

jerlam 7mo ago
Haven't phones, watches and tablets been using low refresh rates to enable battery improvements for a while? The Apple Watch Series 5 (2019) has a refresh rate down to 1Hz. M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024): https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display-oled/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display...
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  Dell needs to sell these XPS. The AI button doesn't do the trick, so battery life may do it.
  - hedora 6mo ago
    What's the real-world battery life though? My mac gets 8 hours real world; 16 in benchmarks; 24 claimed by apple. Assuming the xps has the same size battery, and this really reduces power consumption by 48%, I'd expect 16 hours real world, 32 in benchmarks and 48 in some workload Dell can cherry pick.
    - adgjlsfhk1 6mo ago
      Dell has to deal with windows cuts that in half with all the slop and spyware.
      - quantumink 6mo ago
        Last I checked: the XPS was one of the few laptop product lines offering native Linux (Ubuntu) as an alternative default configuration option to order It's how I got mine about 6-7 years back anyways, still works great (except the battery) ...never let windows get it's claws into the machine in the first place Edit: to add, I realized over time that having a battery that lasts longer just can't seem to beat my older laptop experiences: being able to just swap an extra battery in and have full charge at will (without soldering and all that 'ish) In that sense I feel that the future is coming full circle to modularity, swapability, repairability - to the point they're becoming my primary considerations for the next portable computing select I will need to acquire.
        teo_zero 6mo ago
        > Last I checked I checked 10 seconds ago. The only models I can order in my country with linux are Pro Max and a Precision workstation. If I pretend to be located in the US, an XPS 13 from 2024 becomes available at 200$ more than the Windows variant, and no OLED option. What a weird marketing strategy from Dell...
        quantumink 6mo ago
        Yeah... Took a moment to look it up now: Apparently they stopped making the Developer Edition which came with Ubuntu in 2022-2023 (which was definitely cheaper by 100-200 bucks or so than the Windows version with exact same hardware, I recall the developer edition os discount very clearly) Now the XPS line has fallen as well, as apparently even the SSD now gets soldered to the motherboard, no longer possible to service with basic tools really once it starts failing. My old 2018-ish XPS has an M.2 slot and a battery that is relatively simple by modern standards to replace with some screwdrivers and careful handling (something I think is vital for a workhorse computer, as batteries 'decimate' in capacity within 2-3 years or so in my experience) I don't even know what's left out there anymore among major makers... when I have to look again, maybe framework... Been hearing about them for a bit now and they seem quite relevant to the discussion - haven't seen one live yet to be fair
        iknowstuff 6mo ago
        Powerbanks fill that role well. We have USB-C PD now
        quantumink 6mo ago
        While I concede that powerbanks may satisfy the proximal problem - literally making charging available on demand... Consider that it does not in any way resolve the distal problem of having a 'portable computing device', which heavily compromises on the 'portable' aspect - by forcing a state of permanent battery anxiety without external life support (i.e. no power source - dead in minutes of intensive work) The powerbank is a fine workaround to be fair, but as I see it: still a workaround at best. The ability to swap a battery without getting into things like soldering - allows for far more flexible functionality and longevity than a powerbank could. That is without even mentioning the ultimate problem of parts sustainability and longevity. When you can swap individual components as they degrade, it's possible to use the rest of the machine for far longer than a degraded battery or a failing SSD would allow. Powerbanks simply feel like treating symptoms, instead of rehabilitating the system itself (obviously still use them for phones and such of course)
    - k4rli 6mo ago
      Both my last two XPSes have had shit battery life. Maybe 3.5h when new and only 2h after a few months of use. They also experience a lot of thermal throttling (i7 12700h, 9750h) and newer updates have removed the option of undervolting which used to fix that. Positive is that the battery life couldn't possibly get worse with newer ones.
      - glitchcrab 6mo ago
        I have a December 2024 XPS 15 and I regularly get 7-8 hours out of a charge whilst doing a mixture of tasks. On Linux too, no less.
    - pier25 6mo ago
      I put my MBP in low power mode when using the battery and I get easily 12-15 hours with my full dev environment running.
- MBCook 6mo ago
  Yes but I’m unaware of larger ones.
- trvz 6mo ago
  iPad Pro only goes down to 10 FPS. This may be the display of the upcoming MacBook Pro.
- SXX 6mo ago
  OLED iPad dont have always on because of burn-in. Considering people certainly use it as photo frame, notification and time daahboars, kitchen recipe book, etc. Less of a problem for iphones that unlikely to stay for a week in the same place plugged in and unused.
  - jerlam 6mo ago
    I don't think many people are spending $1k on an iPad Pro, the only iPad with OLED, to use as a picture frame.
    - SXX 6mo ago
      They dont buy it for this purpose. Its just end up like that for a lot of people I know since it just weird device between iphone and macbook that end not being used for much.
      - juleiie 6mo ago
        It’s a professional mobile artist bonanza idk why you claim it isn’t used much when this expensive device is more than earning its worth Yeah sure if you buy it as a toy it may not be used for much lol. Check your consumerism
        SXX 6mo ago
        I not saying anything about device itself. I just pointing out how quite a big part of Apple consumer base use these devices: buy most expensive one, play with it for a few weeks and then leave it as kitchen tablet that is used ocassionally. You know every second housewife wants to be an artist but very few actually use it for this beyond first few weeks. Providing this audience with always-on display is a sure way to have a lot of people unhappy with burned-in OLED screens.
        kakacik 6mo ago
        Yeah so pretty niche use case. No need to attack others with snarky childish comments just because you dont like reality out there
- amaranth 6mo ago
  Phones and watches do that with LTPO OLED which I don't believe exists at higher screen sizes although I'm not sure why. This is supposed to be special because it isn't OLED so should be able to get brighter and not have to worry about burn in.
  - wffurr 6mo ago
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/lg-display-starts-mass-producing-ltpo-like-1-hz-lcd-displays-for-laptops/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/lg-display-starts-ma... is a better article but LG is light on details of their new proprietary display tech.
  - Tuna-Fish 6mo ago
    LTPO has problems with uniformity of brightness, that get worse the larger the panels are. On a phone screen, this is usually not perceivable, but if you made a 27" screen out of it, most such screens would be visibly brighter in some corner or other.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
  Panel Self Refresh should largely just work, and I believe has been on laptops for a long long time. Here's Intel demo'ing it in 2011. https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/14/intel_demos_panel_self_refresh_display_tech/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/14/intel_demos_panel_sel... I'm not sure that there's really anything new here? 1Hz might be lower. Adoption might be not that good. But this might just be iteration on something that many folks have just not really taken good advantage of till now. There's perhaps signficiant display tech advancements to get the Hz low, without having significant G-Sync style screen-buffers to support it. One factor that might be interesting, I don't know if there's a partial refresh anywhere. Having something moving on the screen but everything else stable would be neat to optimize for. I often have a video going in part of a screen. But that doesn't mean the whole screen needs to redraw.
  - withinboredom 6mo ago
    Probably patent licensing shenanigans kept it holed up for awhile.
  - __d 6mo ago
    I’m not an expert here, but … CRTs needed to be refreshed to keep the phosphors glowing. But all screens are now digital: why is there a refresh rate at all? Can’t we memory-map the actual hardware bits behind each pixel and just draw directly (using PCIe or whatever)?
    - kbolino 6mo ago
      I think you're assuming that LCDs all have framebuffers, but this is not the case. A basic/cheap LCD does not store the state of its pixels anywhere. It electrically refreshes them as the signal comes in, much like a CRT. The pixels are blocking light instead of emitting it, but they will still fade out if left unrefreshed for long. So, the simple answer is, you can't get direct access to something when it doesn't even exist in the first place.
- ksec 6mo ago
  >M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024): Brightness, Uniformity, Colour Accuracy etc. It is hard as we take more and more features for granted. There is also cost issues, which is why you only see them in smaller screens.
- KolibriFly 6mo ago
  What LG is pitching here is basically bringing that 1Hz floor capability to large laptop panels
amiga-workbench 7mo ago
Is this materially different from panel self refresh?
- saltcured 7mo ago
  A low refresh rate probably still requires the same display-side framebuffer as PSR. With conventional PSR, I think the goal is to power off the link between the system framebuffer and the display controller and potentially power down the system framebuffer and GPU too. This may not be beneficial unless it can be left off long enough, and there may be substantial latency to fire it all back up. You do it around sleep modes where you are expecting a good long pause. Targeting 1 Hz sounds like actually planning to clock down the link and the system framebuffer so they can run sustain low bandwidth in a more steady state fashion. Presumably you also want to clock down any app and GPU work to not waste time rendering screens nobody will see. This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank" that can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?
  - hyperhello 7mo ago
    But why 1hz? Can’t the panel just leave the pixels on the screen for an arbitrary length of time until something triggers refresh? Only a small amount of my screen changes as I’m typing.
    - saltcured 7mo ago
      When PSR or adaptive refresh rate systems suspend or re-clock the link, this requires reengineering of the link and its controls. All of this evolved out of earlier display links, which evolved out of earlier display DACs for CRTs, which continuously scanned the system framebuffer to serialize pixel data into output signals. This scanning was synchronized to the current display mode and only changed timings when the display mode was set, often which a disruptive glitch and resynchronization period. Much of this design cruft is still there, including the whole idea of "sync to vblank". When you have display persistence, you can imagine a very different architecture where you address screen regions and send update packets all the way to the screen. The screen in effect becomes a compositor. But then you may also want transactional boundaries, so do you end up wanting the screen's embedded buffers to also support double or triple buffering and a buffer-swap command? Or do you just want a sufficiently fast and coordinated "blank and refill" command that can send a whole screen update as a fast burst, and require the full buffer to be composited upstream of the display link? This persistence and selective addressing is actually a special feature of the MIP screens embedded in watches etc. They have a link mode to address and update a small rectangular area of the framebuffer embedded in the screen. It sends a smaller packet of pixel data over the link, rather than sending the whole screen worth of pixels again. This requires different application and graphics driver structure to really support properly and with power efficiency benefits. I.e. you don't want to just set a smaller viewport and have the app continue to render into off-screen areas. You want it to focus on only rendering the smaller updated pixel area.
hasperdi 7mo ago
this is just regurgitating the manufacturer's claim. I believe it when I see it. Most of display energy use is to turn on the OLED/backlight. They're claiming, because our display flickers less, it's 48% more efficient now.
- hasperdi 6mo ago
  [dead]
jrm4 6mo ago
Still waiting on e-ink laptops. This just seems like a no-brainer.
- KolibriFly 6mo ago
  What these variable refresh panels are trying to do is kind of the "best of both worlds"
serious_angel 6mo ago
> LG’s press release leaves several questions unanswered, including the source of the “Oxide” name... > Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432 https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432 [2026-03-23] --- > HKC has announced a new laptop display panel that supports adaptive refresh across a 1 to 60Hz range, including a 1Hz mode for static content. HKC says the panel uses an Oxide (metal-oxide TFT) backplane and its low leakage characteristics to keep the image stable even at 1Hz. > Source: https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive-ultra-low-power-laptop-display https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive... [2025-12-29] --- > History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. ~ Hilary Mantel
- hedora 6mo ago
  > Oxide (metal-oxide TFT) Ok, that makes some amount of sense. The article claims this is an OLED display, and I haven't heard of significant power games from low-refresh-rate OLED (since they have to signal the LED to stay on regardless of refresh rate). However, do TFT's really use as much power as the rest of the laptop combined? They're claiming 48% improvement, so the old TFT (without backlight) has to be equivalent to backlight + wifi + bluetooth + CPU + GPU + keyboard backlight + ...
  - stonogo 6mo ago
    The article says this is an LED panel and LG is working toward an OLED version.
MBCook 6mo ago
As soon as I saw this announced, I wondered if this is why we haven’t seen OLED MacBook Pro yet. Apple already uses similar tech on the phones and watches.
amelius 6mo ago
So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
- etchalon 6mo ago
  If the screen is only refreshing once per second, less energy is used to refresh the screen. The pixel uses the same amount of power.
  - amelius 6mo ago
    I was not under the impression that sending some control signals took that much power.
    - tokai 6mo ago
      You have to compute the new frame too. I would assume that is were most of the power use is.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
    - etchalon 6mo ago
      Maybe not, but doing it once a second instead of 60 times a second is a pretty massive savings.
- tosti 6mo ago
  E-ink displays can do this. That's why they're used in ereaders. Display in TFA OTOH emits light, so definately not.
- perching_aix 6mo ago
  It does, especially with LCDs like this, where the backlight is the primary driver of the power consumption of the panel. I'm not even sure how they got their 48% figure. Sounds like a whole-system measurement, maybe that's the trick.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
stack_framer 6mo ago
I once had an external monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz, and mouse movements were noticeably sluggish. It was part of a multi-monitor setup, so it was very obvious as I moved the mouse between monitors. I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't be an early adopter.
- dghlsakjg 6mo ago
  Read the article. The display has a refresh rate of 120hz when needed. The low refresh rate is for battery savings when there is a static image. Variable refresh rate for power savings is a feature that other manufacturers already have (apple for one). So you might already be an early adopter.
ricardobeat 6mo ago
Apple introduced variable refresh rate back in 2015. That’s over a decade ago, I’m sure there’s some new tech involved here, but quite the omission.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Stroke CRT displays been able to do variable refresh rate since like the 80s, quite the omission there buddy.
- dlcarrier 6mo ago
  And if Apple introduced it a decade ago, then it's at least five years older than that. What's new here is the 1 Hz minimum.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- thelastgallon 6mo ago
  Apple doesn't manufacture panels, they buy from others. I wonder how Apple can claim they have this feature.
- hu3 6mo ago
  Apple might have convinced some gullible customers that this was something new. But to the rest of the world variable refresh rate existed for years by then. As is with most Apple "inventions". In this case the patent goes back to 1982: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4511892A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US4511892A/en
  - ricardobeat 6mo ago
    And this tech has been available in consumer hardware since... ? Take a guess.
nmstoker 6mo ago
Sorry, might be obvious to some, but is that rate applied to the whole screen or can certain parts be limited to 1Hz whilst others are at a higher rate? The ability to vary it seems like it would be valuable as there are significant portions of a screen that remain fairly static for longer periods but equally there are sections that would need to change more often and would thus mess with the ability to stick to a low rate if it's a whole screen all-or-nothing scenario.
- bracketfocus 6mo ago
  From what I understand, the laptop will reduce the refresh rate (of the entire display) to as low as 1Hz if what is being displayed effectively “allows” it. For example: - reading an article with intermittent scrolling - typing with periodic breaks
  - nmstoker 6mo ago
    Got it. Thanks!
  - gowld 6mo ago
    Articles have animated ads, though.
    - msephton 6mo ago
      On such an article it would not go down to 1Hz. It's checking if the image is changing or not.
      - rmunn 6mo ago
        Which would make me want the refresh rate to be user-configurable. I would not mind at all if the 1 Hz refresh rate caused parts of the page I don't care about, such as animated ads to stutter and become unwatchable. If given the choice between stuttering ads but longer battery life, or smoothly-animated ads with shorter battery life, I'd choose the unwatchable ads every time. Ideally, I would be able to bind a keyboard shortcut to the refresh-rate switch, so that the software doesn't have to figure out that now I'm on Youtube so I actually want the higher refresh rate, but now I'm on a mostly-text page so I want the refresh rate to go back down to 1 Hz. If I can control that with a simple Fn+F11 combination or something, that would be the ideal situation. Not that any laptop manufacturers are likely to see this comment... but you never know.
qnleigh 6mo ago
> That will help save enormous amounts of power: up to 48 percent on a single charge, Why does refresh rate have such a large impact on power consumption? I understand that the control electronics are 60x more active at 60 Hz than 1 Hz, but shouldn't the light emission itself be the dominant source of power consumption by far?
- perching_aix 6mo ago
  I interpreted that bit as E2E system uptime being up by 48%. Sounds more plausible to me, as there'd fewer video frames that would need to be produced and pushed out.
- blovescoffee 6mo ago
  There's definitely a few reasons but one of them is that you have to ask the GPU to do ~60x less work when you render 60x less frames
  - Filligree 6mo ago
    Why? Surely copying the same pixels out sixty times doesn't take that much power?
    - hacker_88 6mo ago
      Copying , Draw() is called 60 times a second .
      - hedora 6mo ago
        It isn't for any reasonable UI stack. For instance, the xdamage X11 extension for this was released over 20 years ago. I doubt it was the first.
        giancarlostoro 6mo ago
        At the software level yes, but it seems nobody has taken the time to do this at the hardware level as well. This is LG's stab at it.
londons_explore 6mo ago
Anyone who has accidentally snapped the controller off a working LCD can tell you that the pixel capacitance keeps the colours approximately correct for about 10 seconds before it all becomes a murky shadowy mess... So it makes sense you could cut the refresh time down to a second to save power... Although one wonders if it's worth it when the backlight uses far more power than the control electronics...
- dlcarrier 6mo ago
  It's for OLED screens, so there's no backlight, but also no persistence.
  - mnw21cam 6mo ago
    It's an LCD display.
    - iAMkenough 6mo ago
      Are you sure? Article says: > A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink panel, which isn’t the prettiest to look at. LG’s panel also uses LED technology, the mainstream panel technology that’s being overtaken at the high end by OLED panels with essentially perfect contrast.
      - londons_explore 6mo ago
        Led backlight I assume.
- ErneX 6mo ago
  These are self emissive pixels.
  - ErneX 6mo ago
    Edit: apparently not? Article says OLED with this tech will come in 2027, seems this panel it’s LCD
dizzy9 6mo ago
Perhaps it can do 50Hz, which may be beneficial for emulating PAL systems.
- whalesalad 6mo ago
  Ostensibly any display capable of VRR should be able to operate at any range.
  - hedora 6mo ago
    You don't need VRR for this, but there are some step functions of usefulness: 24Hz - now you can correctly play movies. 30Hz - NTSC (deinterlaced) including TV shows + video game emulators. 50Hz - (24 * 2 = 50 in Hollywood. Go look it up!) Now you can correctly play PAL and movies. 120Hz - Can play frame-accurate movies and NTSC (interlaced or not). Screw Europe because the judder is basically unnoticeable at 120Hz. 144Hz - Can play movies + pwn n00bs or something. 150Hz - Unobtanium but would play NTSC (deinterlaced), PAL and movies with frame level accuracy. 240Hz - Not sure why this is a thing, TBH. (300 would make sense...)
    - martijnvds 6mo ago
      240 = 2 x 120, or 4 x 60 (or 8 x 30)
- Dwedit 6mo ago
  You can use CRU (custom resolution utility) to add 50Hz to most screens.
jerryslm 6mo ago
Today I learned, laptop comes with backlit vs edgelit panel. And, they have different energy consumption. There are also mini LED laptop for creative work. Few more things to check before buying new laptop.
- hedora 6mo ago
  I wouldn't get a mini LED laptop for creative work. We have a mini LED TV, and manufacturers need to choose one of these two problems because of physical limitations: - The LEDs for a mostly dark region with a point source are too bright so the point source is the correct brightness. Benchmark sites call this "blooming" and ding displays for it, so new ones pick the other problem: - The LEDs for mostly dark regions with a point source are too dim so the black pixels don't appear gray. This means that white on black text (like linux terminals) render strangely, with the left part of the line much brighter than the right (since it is next to the "$ ls" and "$" of the surrounding lines). Also, it means that white mouse pointers on black backgrounds render as dark gray. For creative work, I'd pick pretty much any other monitor technology (with high color gamut, of course) over mini LED. However mini-LED is great if you have a TV that is in direct sunlight, since it can blast watts at the brightest parts of the screen without overheating.
sciencesama 6mo ago
imagine what it will do to neo !
bfivyvysj 6mo ago
Make a new phone with this please.
3836293648 6mo ago
The real unanswered question is how much of this is the panel itself and how much is baked into Windows. Saving battery is nice, but I'm not leaving Linux for that misery any time soon
herodoturtle 6mo ago
Tried to open this page on my mobile, good grief the changing advert spam overload kills the reading experience.
- lpcvoid 6mo ago
  Firefox Android + ublock origin. There's ads on the internet? Wouldn't know.
  - cheeze 6mo ago
    Very weird to see people on hackernews of all places complain about ads on the internet. We solved this like 15 years ago.
    - herodoturtle 6mo ago
      Hacker news attracts all sorts of curious people, including luddites like myself! ^_^
purpleidea 6mo ago
What's the chance this will even work on Linux with GNOME?
anotheryou 6mo ago
> A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink panel, which isn’t the prettiest to look at. level of what? Power consumption? dude e-ink takes 0 power between refreshs. And e-ink is pretty?
- riobard 6mo ago
  It just proved the author knows nothing about either technology.
Kaibeezy 6mo ago
Horrid website: forced cookies, invisible adverts (Mamma Mia, anyone?), and that thing where it’s a page of garbage links when you go back. I will never click a PC World URL again.
- emil-lp 6mo ago
  Just activate Reader Mode immediately.
- etothet 6mo ago
  It’s truly unusable. What a mess the web has become.
KolibriFly 6mo ago
Sure dropping toward 1Hz could be huge. But the moment you scroll, watch video, or even have subtle UI animations, you're back in higher refresh territory
- cromka 6mo ago
  How is this a but? This is exactly what you want: the screen refreshes only when a new content appears or once a second.
youknownothing 6mo ago
I'm guessing that for this to work you need to be able to selectively refresh parts of the screen at different rates? a 1Hz refresh rate would be rubbish just to follow the mouse cursor, so at least that part of the screen needs to refresh faster. However, it does make sense for the parts of the screen that are mostly static. Looking at my screen as I type this, the only part that needs a high-refresh rate is the text-box where I'm typing (I can type several keys per second so I wouldn't want a refresh rate of 1 Hz). However, the rest of the screen is not changing at all so a slow refresh is perfectly fine.
- elif 6mo ago
  You're not moving your mouse 100% of the time. Probably less than 25% of the time. Probably using your keyboard less than 25% of the time. It doesn't need to degrade experience OR selectively refresh part of the screen (which it certainly doesn't).
TZubiri 6mo ago
Modern software regularly takes like 1 second to load anyways. 200ms is the minimum human reaction time, so adding 100ms would only add like 50% to the REPL user interaction. Something like 10Hz might be quite usable while minimally contributing to lag. The idea of having a 60Hz screen is nice, but in practice it turns out that display refresh rate is not the bottleneck for most software.
smrtinsert 6mo ago
As someone with PWM sensitivity a low hz trend terrifies me

320 points by robotnikman 7mo ago

Haven't phones, watches and tablets been using low refresh rates to enable battery improvements for a while? The Apple Watch Series 5 (2019) has a refresh rate down to 1Hz. M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024): https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display-oled/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display...

hirako2000 6mo ago
Dell needs to sell these XPS. The AI button doesn't do the trick, so battery life may do it.
- hedora 6mo ago
  What's the real-world battery life though? My mac gets 8 hours real world; 16 in benchmarks; 24 claimed by apple. Assuming the xps has the same size battery, and this really reduces power consumption by 48%, I'd expect 16 hours real world, 32 in benchmarks and 48 in some workload Dell can cherry pick.
  - adgjlsfhk1 6mo ago
    Dell has to deal with windows cuts that in half with all the slop and spyware.
    - quantumink 6mo ago
      Last I checked: the XPS was one of the few laptop product lines offering native Linux (Ubuntu) as an alternative default configuration option to order It's how I got mine about 6-7 years back anyways, still works great (except the battery) ...never let windows get it's claws into the machine in the first place Edit: to add, I realized over time that having a battery that lasts longer just can't seem to beat my older laptop experiences: being able to just swap an extra battery in and have full charge at will (without soldering and all that 'ish) In that sense I feel that the future is coming full circle to modularity, swapability, repairability - to the point they're becoming my primary considerations for the next portable computing select I will need to acquire.
      - teo_zero 6mo ago
        > Last I checked I checked 10 seconds ago. The only models I can order in my country with linux are Pro Max and a Precision workstation. If I pretend to be located in the US, an XPS 13 from 2024 becomes available at 200$ more than the Windows variant, and no OLED option. What a weird marketing strategy from Dell...
        quantumink 6mo ago
        Yeah... Took a moment to look it up now: Apparently they stopped making the Developer Edition which came with Ubuntu in 2022-2023 (which was definitely cheaper by 100-200 bucks or so than the Windows version with exact same hardware, I recall the developer edition os discount very clearly) Now the XPS line has fallen as well, as apparently even the SSD now gets soldered to the motherboard, no longer possible to service with basic tools really once it starts failing. My old 2018-ish XPS has an M.2 slot and a battery that is relatively simple by modern standards to replace with some screwdrivers and careful handling (something I think is vital for a workhorse computer, as batteries 'decimate' in capacity within 2-3 years or so in my experience) I don't even know what's left out there anymore among major makers... when I have to look again, maybe framework... Been hearing about them for a bit now and they seem quite relevant to the discussion - haven't seen one live yet to be fair
      - iknowstuff 6mo ago
        Powerbanks fill that role well. We have USB-C PD now
        quantumink 6mo ago
        While I concede that powerbanks may satisfy the proximal problem - literally making charging available on demand... Consider that it does not in any way resolve the distal problem of having a 'portable computing device', which heavily compromises on the 'portable' aspect - by forcing a state of permanent battery anxiety without external life support (i.e. no power source - dead in minutes of intensive work) The powerbank is a fine workaround to be fair, but as I see it: still a workaround at best. The ability to swap a battery without getting into things like soldering - allows for far more flexible functionality and longevity than a powerbank could. That is without even mentioning the ultimate problem of parts sustainability and longevity. When you can swap individual components as they degrade, it's possible to use the rest of the machine for far longer than a degraded battery or a failing SSD would allow. Powerbanks simply feel like treating symptoms, instead of rehabilitating the system itself (obviously still use them for phones and such of course)
  - k4rli 6mo ago
    Both my last two XPSes have had shit battery life. Maybe 3.5h when new and only 2h after a few months of use. They also experience a lot of thermal throttling (i7 12700h, 9750h) and newer updates have removed the option of undervolting which used to fix that. Positive is that the battery life couldn't possibly get worse with newer ones.
    - glitchcrab 6mo ago
      I have a December 2024 XPS 15 and I regularly get 7-8 hours out of a charge whilst doing a mixture of tasks. On Linux too, no less.
  - pier25 6mo ago
    I put my MBP in low power mode when using the battery and I get easily 12-15 hours with my full dev environment running.
MBCook 6mo ago
Yes but I’m unaware of larger ones.
trvz 6mo ago
iPad Pro only goes down to 10 FPS. This may be the display of the upcoming MacBook Pro.
SXX 6mo ago
OLED iPad dont have always on because of burn-in. Considering people certainly use it as photo frame, notification and time daahboars, kitchen recipe book, etc. Less of a problem for iphones that unlikely to stay for a week in the same place plugged in and unused.
- jerlam 6mo ago
  I don't think many people are spending $1k on an iPad Pro, the only iPad with OLED, to use as a picture frame.
  - SXX 6mo ago
    They dont buy it for this purpose. Its just end up like that for a lot of people I know since it just weird device between iphone and macbook that end not being used for much.
    - juleiie 6mo ago
      It’s a professional mobile artist bonanza idk why you claim it isn’t used much when this expensive device is more than earning its worth Yeah sure if you buy it as a toy it may not be used for much lol. Check your consumerism
      - SXX 6mo ago
        I not saying anything about device itself. I just pointing out how quite a big part of Apple consumer base use these devices: buy most expensive one, play with it for a few weeks and then leave it as kitchen tablet that is used ocassionally. You know every second housewife wants to be an artist but very few actually use it for this beyond first few weeks. Providing this audience with always-on display is a sure way to have a lot of people unhappy with burned-in OLED screens.
      - kakacik 6mo ago
        Yeah so pretty niche use case. No need to attack others with snarky childish comments just because you dont like reality out there
amaranth 6mo ago
Phones and watches do that with LTPO OLED which I don't believe exists at higher screen sizes although I'm not sure why. This is supposed to be special because it isn't OLED so should be able to get brighter and not have to worry about burn in.
- wffurr 6mo ago
  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/lg-display-starts-mass-producing-ltpo-like-1-hz-lcd-displays-for-laptops/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/lg-display-starts-ma... is a better article but LG is light on details of their new proprietary display tech.
- Tuna-Fish 6mo ago
  LTPO has problems with uniformity of brightness, that get worse the larger the panels are. On a phone screen, this is usually not perceivable, but if you made a 27" screen out of it, most such screens would be visibly brighter in some corner or other.
jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
Panel Self Refresh should largely just work, and I believe has been on laptops for a long long time. Here's Intel demo'ing it in 2011. https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/14/intel_demos_panel_self_refresh_display_tech/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/14/intel_demos_panel_sel... I'm not sure that there's really anything new here? 1Hz might be lower. Adoption might be not that good. But this might just be iteration on something that many folks have just not really taken good advantage of till now. There's perhaps signficiant display tech advancements to get the Hz low, without having significant G-Sync style screen-buffers to support it. One factor that might be interesting, I don't know if there's a partial refresh anywhere. Having something moving on the screen but everything else stable would be neat to optimize for. I often have a video going in part of a screen. But that doesn't mean the whole screen needs to redraw.
- withinboredom 6mo ago
  Probably patent licensing shenanigans kept it holed up for awhile.
- __d 6mo ago
  I’m not an expert here, but … CRTs needed to be refreshed to keep the phosphors glowing. But all screens are now digital: why is there a refresh rate at all? Can’t we memory-map the actual hardware bits behind each pixel and just draw directly (using PCIe or whatever)?
  - kbolino 6mo ago
    I think you're assuming that LCDs all have framebuffers, but this is not the case. A basic/cheap LCD does not store the state of its pixels anywhere. It electrically refreshes them as the signal comes in, much like a CRT. The pixels are blocking light instead of emitting it, but they will still fade out if left unrefreshed for long. So, the simple answer is, you can't get direct access to something when it doesn't even exist in the first place.
ksec 6mo ago
>M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024): Brightness, Uniformity, Colour Accuracy etc. It is hard as we take more and more features for granted. There is also cost issues, which is why you only see them in smaller screens.
KolibriFly 6mo ago
What LG is pitching here is basically bringing that 1Hz floor capability to large laptop panels

amiga-workbench 7mo ago

Is this materially different from panel self refresh?

saltcured 7mo ago
A low refresh rate probably still requires the same display-side framebuffer as PSR. With conventional PSR, I think the goal is to power off the link between the system framebuffer and the display controller and potentially power down the system framebuffer and GPU too. This may not be beneficial unless it can be left off long enough, and there may be substantial latency to fire it all back up. You do it around sleep modes where you are expecting a good long pause. Targeting 1 Hz sounds like actually planning to clock down the link and the system framebuffer so they can run sustain low bandwidth in a more steady state fashion. Presumably you also want to clock down any app and GPU work to not waste time rendering screens nobody will see. This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank" that can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?
- hyperhello 7mo ago
  But why 1hz? Can’t the panel just leave the pixels on the screen for an arbitrary length of time until something triggers refresh? Only a small amount of my screen changes as I’m typing.
  - saltcured 7mo ago
    When PSR or adaptive refresh rate systems suspend or re-clock the link, this requires reengineering of the link and its controls. All of this evolved out of earlier display links, which evolved out of earlier display DACs for CRTs, which continuously scanned the system framebuffer to serialize pixel data into output signals. This scanning was synchronized to the current display mode and only changed timings when the display mode was set, often which a disruptive glitch and resynchronization period. Much of this design cruft is still there, including the whole idea of "sync to vblank". When you have display persistence, you can imagine a very different architecture where you address screen regions and send update packets all the way to the screen. The screen in effect becomes a compositor. But then you may also want transactional boundaries, so do you end up wanting the screen's embedded buffers to also support double or triple buffering and a buffer-swap command? Or do you just want a sufficiently fast and coordinated "blank and refill" command that can send a whole screen update as a fast burst, and require the full buffer to be composited upstream of the display link? This persistence and selective addressing is actually a special feature of the MIP screens embedded in watches etc. They have a link mode to address and update a small rectangular area of the framebuffer embedded in the screen. It sends a smaller packet of pixel data over the link, rather than sending the whole screen worth of pixels again. This requires different application and graphics driver structure to really support properly and with power efficiency benefits. I.e. you don't want to just set a smaller viewport and have the app continue to render into off-screen areas. You want it to focus on only rendering the smaller updated pixel area.

hasperdi 7mo ago

this is just regurgitating the manufacturer's claim. I believe it when I see it. Most of display energy use is to turn on the OLED/backlight. They're claiming, because our display flickers less, it's 48% more efficient now.

hasperdi 6mo ago
[dead]

jrm4 6mo ago

Still waiting on e-ink laptops. This just seems like a no-brainer.

KolibriFly 6mo ago
What these variable refresh panels are trying to do is kind of the "best of both worlds"

serious_angel 6mo ago

> LG’s press release leaves several questions unanswered, including the source of the “Oxide” name... > Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432 https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432 [2026-03-23] --- > HKC has announced a new laptop display panel that supports adaptive refresh across a 1 to 60Hz range, including a 1Hz mode for static content. HKC says the panel uses an Oxide (metal-oxide TFT) backplane and its low leakage characteristics to keep the image stable even at 1Hz. > Source: https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive-ultra-low-power-laptop-display https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive... [2025-12-29] --- > History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. ~ Hilary Mantel

hedora 6mo ago
> Oxide (metal-oxide TFT) Ok, that makes some amount of sense. The article claims this is an OLED display, and I haven't heard of significant power games from low-refresh-rate OLED (since they have to signal the LED to stay on regardless of refresh rate). However, do TFT's really use as much power as the rest of the laptop combined? They're claiming 48% improvement, so the old TFT (without backlight) has to be equivalent to backlight + wifi + bluetooth + CPU + GPU + keyboard backlight + ...
- stonogo 6mo ago
  The article says this is an LED panel and LG is working toward an OLED version.

MBCook 6mo ago

As soon as I saw this announced, I wondered if this is why we haven’t seen OLED MacBook Pro yet. Apple already uses similar tech on the phones and watches.

amelius 6mo ago

So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?

etchalon 6mo ago
If the screen is only refreshing once per second, less energy is used to refresh the screen. The pixel uses the same amount of power.
- amelius 6mo ago
  I was not under the impression that sending some control signals took that much power.
  - tokai 6mo ago
    You have to compute the new frame too. I would assume that is were most of the power use is.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - etchalon 6mo ago
    Maybe not, but doing it once a second instead of 60 times a second is a pretty massive savings.
tosti 6mo ago
E-ink displays can do this. That's why they're used in ereaders. Display in TFA OTOH emits light, so definately not.
perching_aix 6mo ago
It does, especially with LCDs like this, where the backlight is the primary driver of the power consumption of the panel. I'm not even sure how they got their 48% figure. Sounds like a whole-system measurement, maybe that's the trick.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

stack_framer 6mo ago

I once had an external monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz, and mouse movements were noticeably sluggish. It was part of a multi-monitor setup, so it was very obvious as I moved the mouse between monitors. I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't be an early adopter.

dghlsakjg 6mo ago
Read the article. The display has a refresh rate of 120hz when needed. The low refresh rate is for battery savings when there is a static image. Variable refresh rate for power savings is a feature that other manufacturers already have (apple for one). So you might already be an early adopter.

ricardobeat 6mo ago

Apple introduced variable refresh rate back in 2015. That’s over a decade ago, I’m sure there’s some new tech involved here, but quite the omission.

embedding-shape 6mo ago
Stroke CRT displays been able to do variable refresh rate since like the 80s, quite the omission there buddy.
dlcarrier 6mo ago
And if Apple introduced it a decade ago, then it's at least five years older than that. What's new here is the 1 Hz minimum.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
thelastgallon 6mo ago
Apple doesn't manufacture panels, they buy from others. I wonder how Apple can claim they have this feature.
hu3 6mo ago
Apple might have convinced some gullible customers that this was something new. But to the rest of the world variable refresh rate existed for years by then. As is with most Apple "inventions". In this case the patent goes back to 1982: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4511892A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US4511892A/en
- ricardobeat 6mo ago
  And this tech has been available in consumer hardware since... ? Take a guess.

nmstoker 6mo ago

Sorry, might be obvious to some, but is that rate applied to the whole screen or can certain parts be limited to 1Hz whilst others are at a higher rate? The ability to vary it seems like it would be valuable as there are significant portions of a screen that remain fairly static for longer periods but equally there are sections that would need to change more often and would thus mess with the ability to stick to a low rate if it's a whole screen all-or-nothing scenario.

bracketfocus 6mo ago
From what I understand, the laptop will reduce the refresh rate (of the entire display) to as low as 1Hz if what is being displayed effectively “allows” it. For example: - reading an article with intermittent scrolling - typing with periodic breaks
- nmstoker 6mo ago
  Got it. Thanks!
- gowld 6mo ago
  Articles have animated ads, though.
  - msephton 6mo ago
    On such an article it would not go down to 1Hz. It's checking if the image is changing or not.
    - rmunn 6mo ago
      Which would make me want the refresh rate to be user-configurable. I would not mind at all if the 1 Hz refresh rate caused parts of the page I don't care about, such as animated ads to stutter and become unwatchable. If given the choice between stuttering ads but longer battery life, or smoothly-animated ads with shorter battery life, I'd choose the unwatchable ads every time. Ideally, I would be able to bind a keyboard shortcut to the refresh-rate switch, so that the software doesn't have to figure out that now I'm on Youtube so I actually want the higher refresh rate, but now I'm on a mostly-text page so I want the refresh rate to go back down to 1 Hz. If I can control that with a simple Fn+F11 combination or something, that would be the ideal situation. Not that any laptop manufacturers are likely to see this comment... but you never know.

qnleigh 6mo ago

> That will help save enormous amounts of power: up to 48 percent on a single charge, Why does refresh rate have such a large impact on power consumption? I understand that the control electronics are 60x more active at 60 Hz than 1 Hz, but shouldn't the light emission itself be the dominant source of power consumption by far?

perching_aix 6mo ago
I interpreted that bit as E2E system uptime being up by 48%. Sounds more plausible to me, as there'd fewer video frames that would need to be produced and pushed out.
blovescoffee 6mo ago
There's definitely a few reasons but one of them is that you have to ask the GPU to do ~60x less work when you render 60x less frames
- Filligree 6mo ago
  Why? Surely copying the same pixels out sixty times doesn't take that much power?
  - hacker_88 6mo ago
    Copying , Draw() is called 60 times a second .
    - hedora 6mo ago
      It isn't for any reasonable UI stack. For instance, the xdamage X11 extension for this was released over 20 years ago. I doubt it was the first.
      - giancarlostoro 6mo ago
        At the software level yes, but it seems nobody has taken the time to do this at the hardware level as well. This is LG's stab at it.

londons_explore 6mo ago

Anyone who has accidentally snapped the controller off a working LCD can tell you that the pixel capacitance keeps the colours approximately correct for about 10 seconds before it all becomes a murky shadowy mess... So it makes sense you could cut the refresh time down to a second to save power... Although one wonders if it's worth it when the backlight uses far more power than the control electronics...

dlcarrier 6mo ago
It's for OLED screens, so there's no backlight, but also no persistence.
- mnw21cam 6mo ago
  It's an LCD display.
  - iAMkenough 6mo ago
    Are you sure? Article says: > A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink panel, which isn’t the prettiest to look at. LG’s panel also uses LED technology, the mainstream panel technology that’s being overtaken at the high end by OLED panels with essentially perfect contrast.
    - londons_explore 6mo ago
      Led backlight I assume.
ErneX 6mo ago
These are self emissive pixels.
- ErneX 6mo ago
  Edit: apparently not? Article says OLED with this tech will come in 2027, seems this panel it’s LCD

dizzy9 6mo ago

Perhaps it can do 50Hz, which may be beneficial for emulating PAL systems.

whalesalad 6mo ago
Ostensibly any display capable of VRR should be able to operate at any range.
- hedora 6mo ago
  You don't need VRR for this, but there are some step functions of usefulness: 24Hz - now you can correctly play movies. 30Hz - NTSC (deinterlaced) including TV shows + video game emulators. 50Hz - (24 * 2 = 50 in Hollywood. Go look it up!) Now you can correctly play PAL and movies. 120Hz - Can play frame-accurate movies and NTSC (interlaced or not). Screw Europe because the judder is basically unnoticeable at 120Hz. 144Hz - Can play movies + pwn n00bs or something. 150Hz - Unobtanium but would play NTSC (deinterlaced), PAL and movies with frame level accuracy. 240Hz - Not sure why this is a thing, TBH. (300 would make sense...)
  - martijnvds 6mo ago
    240 = 2 x 120, or 4 x 60 (or 8 x 30)
Dwedit 6mo ago
You can use CRU (custom resolution utility) to add 50Hz to most screens.

jerryslm 6mo ago

Today I learned, laptop comes with backlit vs edgelit panel. And, they have different energy consumption. There are also mini LED laptop for creative work. Few more things to check before buying new laptop.

hedora 6mo ago
I wouldn't get a mini LED laptop for creative work. We have a mini LED TV, and manufacturers need to choose one of these two problems because of physical limitations: - The LEDs for a mostly dark region with a point source are too bright so the point source is the correct brightness. Benchmark sites call this "blooming" and ding displays for it, so new ones pick the other problem: - The LEDs for mostly dark regions with a point source are too dim so the black pixels don't appear gray. This means that white on black text (like linux terminals) render strangely, with the left part of the line much brighter than the right (since it is next to the "$ ls" and "$" of the surrounding lines). Also, it means that white mouse pointers on black backgrounds render as dark gray. For creative work, I'd pick pretty much any other monitor technology (with high color gamut, of course) over mini LED. However mini-LED is great if you have a TV that is in direct sunlight, since it can blast watts at the brightest parts of the screen without overheating.

sciencesama 6mo ago

imagine what it will do to neo !

bfivyvysj 6mo ago

Make a new phone with this please.

3836293648 6mo ago

The real unanswered question is how much of this is the panel itself and how much is baked into Windows. Saving battery is nice, but I'm not leaving Linux for that misery any time soon

herodoturtle 6mo ago

Tried to open this page on my mobile, good grief the changing advert spam overload kills the reading experience.

lpcvoid 6mo ago
Firefox Android + ublock origin. There's ads on the internet? Wouldn't know.
- cheeze 6mo ago
  Very weird to see people on hackernews of all places complain about ads on the internet. We solved this like 15 years ago.
  - herodoturtle 6mo ago
    Hacker news attracts all sorts of curious people, including luddites like myself! ^_^

purpleidea 6mo ago

What's the chance this will even work on Linux with GNOME?

anotheryou 6mo ago

> A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink panel, which isn’t the prettiest to look at. level of what? Power consumption? dude e-ink takes 0 power between refreshs. And e-ink is pretty?

riobard 6mo ago
It just proved the author knows nothing about either technology.

Kaibeezy 6mo ago

Horrid website: forced cookies, invisible adverts (Mamma Mia, anyone?), and that thing where it’s a page of garbage links when you go back. I will never click a PC World URL again.

emil-lp 6mo ago
Just activate Reader Mode immediately.
etothet 6mo ago
It’s truly unusable. What a mess the web has become.

KolibriFly 6mo ago

Sure dropping toward 1Hz could be huge. But the moment you scroll, watch video, or even have subtle UI animations, you're back in higher refresh territory

cromka 6mo ago
How is this a but? This is exactly what you want: the screen refreshes only when a new content appears or once a second.

youknownothing 6mo ago

I'm guessing that for this to work you need to be able to selectively refresh parts of the screen at different rates? a 1Hz refresh rate would be rubbish just to follow the mouse cursor, so at least that part of the screen needs to refresh faster. However, it does make sense for the parts of the screen that are mostly static. Looking at my screen as I type this, the only part that needs a high-refresh rate is the text-box where I'm typing (I can type several keys per second so I wouldn't want a refresh rate of 1 Hz). However, the rest of the screen is not changing at all so a slow refresh is perfectly fine.

elif 6mo ago
You're not moving your mouse 100% of the time. Probably less than 25% of the time. Probably using your keyboard less than 25% of the time. It doesn't need to degrade experience OR selectively refresh part of the screen (which it certainly doesn't).

TZubiri 6mo ago

Modern software regularly takes like 1 second to load anyways. 200ms is the minimum human reaction time, so adding 100ms would only add like 50% to the REPL user interaction. Something like 10Hz might be quite usable while minimally contributing to lag. The idea of having a 60Hz screen is nice, but in practice it turns out that display refresh rate is not the bottleneck for most software.

smrtinsert 6mo ago

As someone with PWM sensitivity a low hz trend terrifies me