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Is there any evidence that lower resolution screens imply an increase in battery life? You'll find people saying this all the time, but you'll also find that i

by DCKing 12y ago

Is there any evidence that lower resolution screens imply an increase in battery life? You'll find people saying this all the time, but you'll also find that it's mostly based on armchair reasoning. I'm willing to accept that higher resolution => higher GPU usage => battery usage increase, but I'm not willing to accept that this has a significant impact, not on face value. Not considering that the GPU is only heavily used in short bursts for all tasks that are not gaming, and considering that its power drain is likely still insignificant when compared to the power usage of the backlight. A year or two ago you could compare the HTC One M7 and the Nexus 4. Two phones with very similar internals and screen size, but the HTC has a 1080p screen and was usually reviewed to have a slightly longer battery life.

untog 12y ago
I think it's more screen size, not screen resolution. It's just that the two usually go hand in hand.
- delecti 12y ago
  Bigger screen means more power needed to light it up, but more pixels takes more computation to push the data. It probably varies how much of a factor each component is, but it's definitely both.
  - runeks 12y ago
    For two displays of different size with equal brightness showing the same image, the larger one will consume more power (at the very least (100% efficiency), the display will consume the amount of energy contained in the photons that are radiated out from each pixel). But a larger screen won't necessarily require much more computation. Imagine showing photos, for example. The increased size of the memory copy (from disk to RAM to GPU), won't consume much more power, I would think. And if it does, it will only be when loading the image to show it on the screen. After this is over, it will sit idle until loading the next image (consuming no additional power from use of CPU/GPU/storage). For games, though, you're right. A higher resolution display will make a larger difference in CPU/GPU/storage power use, especially if the CPU is used, since the GPU is probably designed for a higher resolution display.
Encosia 12y ago
A single data point, but I get a noticeable bump in battery life when I run my QHD+ laptop display at half resolution.
tomhack 12y ago
I can tell you that the LG G3 required a high frequency on the ddr and bus whenever the screen is up compared to the LG G2 using the same snapdragon 800 (yea i know it's 801, not that big of a difference for this discussion). so everything else equal you already have a higher idle current drain from the SOC side whenever screen is powered up.

by DCKing 12y ago

untog 12y ago

I think it's more screen size, not screen resolution. It's just that the two usually go hand in hand.

delecti 12y ago
Bigger screen means more power needed to light it up, but more pixels takes more computation to push the data. It probably varies how much of a factor each component is, but it's definitely both.
- runeks 12y ago
  For two displays of different size with equal brightness showing the same image, the larger one will consume more power (at the very least (100% efficiency), the display will consume the amount of energy contained in the photons that are radiated out from each pixel). But a larger screen won't necessarily require much more computation. Imagine showing photos, for example. The increased size of the memory copy (from disk to RAM to GPU), won't consume much more power, I would think. And if it does, it will only be when loading the image to show it on the screen. After this is over, it will sit idle until loading the next image (consuming no additional power from use of CPU/GPU/storage). For games, though, you're right. A higher resolution display will make a larger difference in CPU/GPU/storage power use, especially if the CPU is used, since the GPU is probably designed for a higher resolution display.

Encosia 12y ago

A single data point, but I get a noticeable bump in battery life when I run my QHD+ laptop display at half resolution.

tomhack 12y ago

I can tell you that the LG G3 required a high frequency on the ddr and bus whenever the screen is up compared to the LG G2 using the same snapdragon 800 (yea i know it's 801, not that big of a difference for this discussion). so everything else equal you already have a higher idle current drain from the SOC side whenever screen is powered up.