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.
LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
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Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#12Haven'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...
iPad Pro only goes down to 10 FPS. This may be the display of the upcoming MacBook Pro.
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#13Haven'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 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.
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#14Is this materially different from panel self refresh?
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…
> This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank" that can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?
I was under the impression that modern compositors operated on a callback basis where they send explicit requests for new frames only when they are needed.
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#15So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#16So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
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.
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#17Haven'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...
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.
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#18[deleted]
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#19Haven'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...
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_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.
Re: LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
#20So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
E-ink displays can do this. That's why they're used in ereaders. Display in TFA OTOH emits light, so definately not.