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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Surely copying the same pixels out sixty times doesn't take that much power?
Copying , Draw() is called 60 times a second .
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 lo…
With current LCD controllers but new drivers/firmware you could selectively refresh horizontal stripes of the screen at different rates if you wanted to. I don't think you could divide vertically though. Don't think anyone has done this yet. You could be the first.
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...
Dell needs to sell these XPS. The AI button doesn't do the trick, so battery life may do it.
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.
So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
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.
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.
> LG’s press release leaves several questions unanswered, including the source of the “Oxide” name... > Source: 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 t…
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 + ...
> 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?
But the article is about an OLED display, so the pixels themselves are emitting light.
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.
- 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.