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

pcworld.com

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

#91

Post by joecool1029 »

topspin wrote: post #76
Filligree wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Surely copying the same pixels out sixty times doesn't take that much power?

The PCWorld story is trash and completely omits the key point of the new display technology, which is right in the name: "Oxide." LG has a new low-leakage thin-film transistor[1] for the display backplane. Simply, this means each pixel can hold its state longer between refreshes. So, the panel can safely drop its refresh rate to 1Hz on static content without losing the image. Yes, even "copying the same pixels" costs…

So it's a Sharp MIP scaled up? https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/

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

#92

Post by etchalon »

amelius wrote: post #24
etchalon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was not under the impression that sending some control signals took that much power.

Maybe not, but doing it once a second instead of 60 times a second is a pretty massive savings.

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

#93

Post by rmunn »

msephton wrote: post #88
gowld wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Articles have animated ads, though.

On such an article it would not go down to 1Hz. It's checking if the image is changing or not.

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.

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

#94

Post by topspin »

joecool1029 wrote: post #91
topspin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PCWorld story is trash and completely omits the key point of the new display technology, which is right in the name: "Oxide." LG has a new low-leakage thin-film transistor[1] for the display backplane. Simply, this means each pixel can hold its state longer between refreshes. So, the panel can safely drop its refresh rate to 1Hz on static content without losing the image. Yes, even "copying the same pixels" costs…

So it's a Sharp MIP scaled up? https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/

Sharp MIP makes every pixel an SRAM bit: near-zero current and no refresh necessary. The full color moral equivalent of Sharp MIP would be 3 DACs per pixel. TFT (à la LG Oxide) is closer to DRAM, except the charge level isn't just high/low.

So, no, there is a meaningful difference in the nature of the circuits.

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

#95

Post by SXX »

jerlam wrote: post #78
SXX wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think many people are spending $1k on an iPad Pro, the only iPad with OLED, to use as a picture frame.

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.

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

#96

Post by hu3 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #26

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.

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

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

#97

Post by Mogzol »

rmunn wrote: post #93
msephton wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On such an article it would not go down to 1Hz. It's checking if the image is changing or not.

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 keybo…

I assume this will just be using Window's dynamic refresh rate feature, which you can turn on and off in the display settings, and when it's off you can set the refresh rate manually. I guess the question is whether they will let you set it as low as 1hz manually though.

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

#99

Post by topspin »

hedora wrote: post #50
qnleigh wrote: post #32

> 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?

This is an OLED display, so I don't think the control electronics are actually any less active. (They would be for LCD, which is where most of these low-refresh-rate optimizations make sense.) The connection between the GPU and the display has been run length encoded (or better) since forever, since that reduces the amount of energy used to send the next frame to the display controller. Maybe by "1Hz" they mean they…

> This is an OLED display

The LG press release states that it's LCD/TFT.

https://news.lgdisplay.com/en/2026/03/lg-display-becomes-wor...

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

#100

Post by delusional »

vlovich123 wrote: post #82
hedora wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Xdamage isn’t a thing if you’re using a compositor for what it’s worth. It’s more expensive to try to incrementally render than to just render the entire scene (for a GPU anyway). And regardless, the HW path still involves copying the entire frame buffer - it’s literally in the name.

Thats not true. I wrote a compositor based on xcompmgr, and there damage was widely used. It's true that it's basically pointless to do damage tracking for the final pass on gl, but damage was still useful to figure out which windows required new blurs and updated glows.
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