Would downscaling a display allow for better battery life?
Hello. I know this isn't completely related to Linux, but I was still curious about it.
I've been looking at Linux laptops and one that caught my eye from Tuxedo had 13 hours of battery life on idle, or 9 hours of browsing the web. The thing is, that device had a 3k display.
My question is, as someone used to 1080p and someone that always tries to maximise the battery life out of a laptop, would downscaling the display be helpful? And if so, is it even worth it, or are the benefits too small to notice?
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As a web developer, I noticed that some elements such as very big tables struggle to render on 4K but are absolutely fine at 1080p. I would assume that means the CPU and/or GPU are more taxed to draw at higher resolution, and therefore I assume they would draw more power. I might be mistaken. Do you speak by experience?
I'm a flutter dev, and I've seen testimonies from a former Windows 98 dev about limiting the number of redraws in the shell.
There's deffo extra overhead, but it's not linear - 4k being 4 times as many pixels as 1080p doesn't mean 4k the work to render after the first frame, as the browser/framework will cache certain layout elements.
The initial layout is still expensive, though, so big tables will take longer, but that big table at high Res will probably be less chuggy when scrolling once loaded.
I am not sure... in the case I'm referring to, they were lagging also when scrolling. But it was React, so native browser rendering. And they were actually very large tables, so we had to do some funny things like viewport culling (see react-window).
For what it's worth I've never had any similar performance issues with tables in Flutter (web with the canvas-based render engine, not Android) when applying the same culling technique, they just ran fine at any resolution. Different hardware, though, so it's not an apple to apple comparison.
In any case just to be safe I would personally assume less pixels = less work = less power = more battery life. My opinion is very unscientific though.