> 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?
I used to be a display architect about 15 years back (for Qualcomm mirasol, et al), so my knowledge of the specifics / numbers is outdated. Sharing what I know.
High pixel density displays have disproportionately higher display refresh power (not just proportional to the total number of pixels as the column lines capacitances need to be driven again for writing each row of pixels). This was an important concern as high pixel densities were coming along.
Display needs fast refreshing not just because pixel would lose charge, but because the a refresh can be visible or result in flicker. Some pixels tech require flipping polarity on each refresh but the curves are not exactly symmetric between polarities, and further, this can vary across the panel. A fast enough refresh hides the mismatch.
Since you are knowledgable about this, do you have any idea what happened to Mirasol technology? I was fascinated by those colour e-paper like displays, and disappointed when plans to manufacture it was shelved. Then I learnt Apple purchased it but it looks more like a patent padding purchase than for tech development as nothing has come out of it form Apple too. Is it in some way still being developed or parts of its research tech being used in display development?
Really disappointing to only learn this after a decade, but on Linux changing from 60hz to 40hz decreased my power draw by 40% in the last hour since reading this comment.
I think the idea is that in an always-on display mode, most of the screen is black and the rest is dim, so circuitry power budget becomes a much larger fraction of overhead.
I interpreted that bit as E2E system uptime being up by 48%. Sounds more plausible to me, as there'd fewer video frames that would need to be produced and pushed out.
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 also only send diffs between frames? That'd be a bigger win than "1Hz" for most use cases.
But, to answer your question, the light emission and computation of the frames (which can be skipped for idle screen regions, regardless of frame rate) should dwarf the transmission cost of sending the frame from the GPU to the panel.
The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. (The next step in my analysis would involve computing the wattage requirements of the CPU, GPU and light emission, then comparing that to the KWh of the laptop battery + advertised battery life.
> The more I think about this, the less sense it makes
And yet, it’s the fundamental technology enabling always on phone and smartwatch displays
The intent of this is to reduce the time that the CPU, GPU, and display controller is in an active state (as well as small reductions in power of components in between those stages).
Before OLED (and similar), most displays were lit with LEDs (behind or around the screen, through a diffuser, then through liquid crystals) which was indeed the dominant power draw... like 90% or so!
But the article is about an OLED display, so the pixels themselves are emitting light.
It doesn't. They take extreme use cases such as watching video until the battery depletes at maximum brightness where 90% of power consumption is the display. But in realistic use cases the fraction of power draw consumed by the display is much smaller when the CPU is actually doing things.
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.
LTPO has problems with uniformity of brightness, that get worse the larger the panels are. On a phone screen, this is usually not perceivable, but if you made a 27" screen out of it, most such screens would be visibly brighter in some corner or other.
What's the real-world battery life though? My mac gets 8 hours real world; 16 in benchmarks; 24 claimed by apple.
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.
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.
>M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024):
Brightness, Uniformity, Colour Accuracy etc. It is hard as we take more and more features for granted. There is also cost issues, which is why you only see them in smaller screens.
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.
> 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 the image stable even at 1Hz.
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 + ...
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 low rate if it's a whole screen all-or-nothing scenario.
From what I understand, the laptop will reduce the refresh rate (of the entire display) to as low as 1Hz if what is being displayed effectively “allows” it.
I think windows has a feature built in on some adaptive refresh rate displays to dynamically shift the frame rate down (to 30, on my screen) or up to the cap, depending on what’s actually happening.
I remember playing with it a bit, and it would dynamically change to a high refresh rate as you moved the mouse, and then drop down as soon as the mouse cursor stopped moving.
I had issues with it sometimes being lower refresh rate even when there was motion on screen, so the frame rate swings were unfortunately noticeable. Motion would get smoother for all content whenever the mouse moved.
1hz is drastically fewer refreshes. I hope they have the “is this content static” measurement actually worked out to a degree where it’s not noticeable.
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.
I believe E-ink displays do this for faster updates for touch interactivity. Updatimg the whole display as the user writes on the touch screen would otherwise be too slow for Eink.
Today it's mostly "all-or-nothing" at the panel level, but under the hood there's already a lot of cleverness trying to approximate the behavior you're describing
I'm guessing that for this to work you need to be able to selectively refresh parts of the screen at different rates? a 1Hz refresh rate would be rubbish just to follow the mouse cursor, so at least that part of the screen needs to refresh faster. However, it does make sense for the parts of the screen that are mostly static. Looking at my screen as I type this, the only part that needs a high-refresh rate is the text-box where I'm typing (I can type several keys per second so I wouldn't want a refresh rate of 1 Hz). However, the rest of the screen is not changing at all so a slow refresh is perfectly fine.
You're not moving your mouse 100% of the time. Probably less than 25% of the time. Probably using your keyboard less than 25% of the time. It doesn't need to degrade experience OR selectively refresh part of the screen (which it certainly doesn't).
Anyone who has accidentally snapped the controller off a working LCD can tell you that the pixel capacitance keeps the colours approximately correct for about 10 seconds before it all becomes a murky shadowy mess...
So it makes sense you could cut the refresh time down to a second to save power...
Although one wonders if it's worth it when the backlight uses far more power than the control electronics...
Horrid website: forced cookies, invisible adverts (Mamma Mia, anyone?), and that thing where it’s a page of garbage links when you go back. I will never click a PC World URL again.
Sure dropping toward 1Hz could be huge. But the moment you scroll, watch video, or even have subtle UI animations, you're back in higher refresh territory
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 modes where you are expecting a good long pause.
Targeting 1 Hz sounds like actually planning to clock down the link and the system framebuffer so they can run sustain low bandwidth in a more steady state fashion. Presumably you also want to clock down any app and GPU work to not waste time rendering screens nobody will see. This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank" that can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?
But why 1hz? Can’t the panel just leave the pixels on the screen for an arbitrary length of time until something triggers refresh? Only a small amount of my screen changes as I’m typing.
> 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.
Modern software regularly takes like 1 second to load anyways.
200ms is the minimum human reaction time, so adding 100ms would only add like 50% to the REPL user interaction. Something like 10Hz might be quite usable while minimally contributing to lag.
The idea of having a 60Hz screen is nice, but in practice it turns out that display refresh rate is not the bottleneck for most software.
I wouldn't get a mini LED laptop for creative work. We have a mini LED TV, and manufacturers need to choose one of these two problems because of physical limitations:
- 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.
For sample-and-hold panel technologies like LCD and OLED, refresh is about updating the pixel state (color). There is a process that takes place for that even when the pixel data remains unchanged between frames. However, the pixels still need to emit light between refreshes, which for LCD is a backlight but for OLED are the pixel themselves. The light emission is often regulated using PWM at a higher frequency than the refresh rate. PWM frequency affects power consumption as well. Higher PWM frequency is better for the eyes, but also consumes more power.
OLED is fundamentally not sample and hold, because it is using PWM, right?
Ignoring switching costs, keeping a sample-and-hold LED at 0%, 50% and 100% brightness all cost zero energy. For an OLED, the costs are closer to linear in the duty cycle (again, ignoring switching costs, but those are happening much faster than the framerate for OLED, right?)
(Also, according to another comment, the panel manufacturer says this is TFT, not OLED, which makes a lot more sense.)
this is just regurgitating the manufacturer's claim. I believe it when I see it. Most of display energy use is to turn on the OLED/backlight. They're claiming, because our display flickers less, it's 48% more efficient now.
I once had an external monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz, and mouse movements were noticeably sluggish. It was part of a multi-monitor setup, so it was very obvious as I moved the mouse between monitors.
I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't be an early adopter.
> 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?
I used to be a display architect about 15 years back (for Qualcomm mirasol, et al), so my knowledge of the specifics / numbers is outdated. Sharing what I know.
High pixel density displays have disproportionately higher display refresh power (not just proportional to the total number of pixels as the column lines capacitances need to be driven again for writing each row of pixels). This was an important concern as high pixel densities were coming along.
Display needs fast refreshing not just because pixel would lose charge, but because the a refresh can be visible or result in flicker. Some pixels tech require flipping polarity on each refresh but the curves are not exactly symmetric between polarities, and further, this can vary across the panel. A fast enough refresh hides the mismatch.
Since you are knowledgable about this, do you have any idea what happened to Mirasol technology? I was fascinated by those colour e-paper like displays, and disappointed when plans to manufacture it was shelved. Then I learnt Apple purchased it but it looks more like a patent padding purchase than for tech development as nothing has come out of it form Apple too. Is it in some way still being developed or parts of its research tech being used in display development?
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What's interesting about these newer 1Hz claims is that they're basically trying to sidestep the exact problems you mention
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There's definitely a few reasons but one of them is that you have to ask the GPU to do ~60x less work when you render 60x less frames
PSR (panel self-refresh) lets you send a single frame from software and tell the display to keep using that.
You don’t need to render 60 times the same frame in software just to keep that visible on screen.
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Why? Surely copying the same pixels out sixty times doesn't take that much power?
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Really disappointing to only learn this after a decade, but on Linux changing from 60hz to 40hz decreased my power draw by 40% in the last hour since reading this comment.
Your GPU rendering 1 frame vs your GPU rendering 60 frames.
I think the idea is that in an always-on display mode, most of the screen is black and the rest is dim, so circuitry power budget becomes a much larger fraction of overhead.
Ohh like property tax on a vacant building
I interpreted that bit as E2E system uptime being up by 48%. Sounds more plausible to me, as there'd fewer video frames that would need to be produced and pushed out.
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 also only send diffs between frames? That'd be a bigger win than "1Hz" for most use cases.
But, to answer your question, the light emission and computation of the frames (which can be skipped for idle screen regions, regardless of frame rate) should dwarf the transmission cost of sending the frame from the GPU to the panel.
The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. (The next step in my analysis would involve computing the wattage requirements of the CPU, GPU and light emission, then comparing that to the KWh of the laptop battery + advertised battery life.
Not OLED.
> LG Display is also preparing to begin mass production of a 1Hz OLED panel incorporating the same technology in 2027.
> 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...
> The more I think about this, the less sense it makes
And yet, it’s the fundamental technology enabling always on phone and smartwatch displays
The intent of this is to reduce the time that the CPU, GPU, and display controller is in an active state (as well as small reductions in power of components in between those stages).
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Before OLED (and similar), most displays were lit with LEDs (behind or around the screen, through a diffuser, then through liquid crystals) which was indeed the dominant power draw... like 90% or so!
But the article is about an OLED display, so the pixels themselves are emitting light.
> But the article is about an OLED display
The article is about an LCD display, actually.
I just wish "we" wouldn't have discarded the option to use pure black for dark modes in favor of a seemingly ever-brightening blue-grey...
It doesn't. They take extreme use cases such as watching video until the battery depletes at maximum brightness where 90% of power consumption is the display. But in realistic use cases the fraction of power draw consumed by the display is much smaller when the CPU is actually doing things.
For whatever reason I keep catching my macbook on max brightness. Maybe not an unrealistic test.
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...
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.
LTPO has problems with uniformity of brightness, that get worse the larger the panels are. On a phone screen, this is usually not perceivable, but if you made a 27" screen out of it, most such screens would be visibly brighter in some corner or other.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/lg-display-starts-ma... is a better article but LG is light on details of their new proprietary display tech.
Dell needs to sell these XPS. The AI button doesn't do the trick, so battery life may do it.
What's the real-world battery life though? My mac gets 8 hours real world; 16 in benchmarks; 24 claimed by apple.
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.
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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.
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What LG is pitching here is basically bringing that 1Hz floor capability to large laptop panels
iPad Pro only goes down to 10 FPS. This may be the display of the upcoming MacBook Pro.
>M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024):
Brightness, Uniformity, Colour Accuracy etc. It is hard as we take more and more features for granted. There is also cost issues, which is why you only see them in smaller screens.
Yes but I’m unaware of larger ones.
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.
I’m not an expert here, but …
CRTs needed to be refreshed to keep the phosphors glowing. But all screens are now digital: why is there a refresh rate at all?
Can’t we memory-map the actual hardware bits behind each pixel and just draw directly (using PCIe or whatever)?
Probably patent licensing shenanigans kept it holed up for awhile.
> 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 the image stable even at 1Hz.
> Source: https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive... [2025-12-29]
---
> History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. ~ Hilary Mantel
> Oxide (metal-oxide TFT)
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 + ...
The article says this is an LED panel and LG is working toward an OLED version.
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 low rate if it's a whole screen all-or-nothing scenario.
From what I understand, the laptop will reduce the refresh rate (of the entire display) to as low as 1Hz if what is being displayed effectively “allows” it.
For example:
- reading an article with intermittent scrolling
- typing with periodic breaks
I think windows has a feature built in on some adaptive refresh rate displays to dynamically shift the frame rate down (to 30, on my screen) or up to the cap, depending on what’s actually happening.
I remember playing with it a bit, and it would dynamically change to a high refresh rate as you moved the mouse, and then drop down as soon as the mouse cursor stopped moving.
I had issues with it sometimes being lower refresh rate even when there was motion on screen, so the frame rate swings were unfortunately noticeable. Motion would get smoother for all content whenever the mouse moved.
1hz is drastically fewer refreshes. I hope they have the “is this content static” measurement actually worked out to a degree where it’s not noticeable.
Who “decides” the frame rate? Does the gpu keep sending data and the monitor checks to determine when pixels change?
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Got it. Thanks!
Articles have animated ads, though.
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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.
I believe E-ink displays do this for faster updates for touch interactivity. Updatimg the whole display as the user writes on the touch screen would otherwise be too slow for Eink.
Today it's mostly "all-or-nothing" at the panel level, but under the hood there's already a lot of cleverness trying to approximate the behavior you're describing
I'm guessing that for this to work you need to be able to selectively refresh parts of the screen at different rates? a 1Hz refresh rate would be rubbish just to follow the mouse cursor, so at least that part of the screen needs to refresh faster. However, it does make sense for the parts of the screen that are mostly static. Looking at my screen as I type this, the only part that needs a high-refresh rate is the text-box where I'm typing (I can type several keys per second so I wouldn't want a refresh rate of 1 Hz). However, the rest of the screen is not changing at all so a slow refresh is perfectly fine.
You're not moving your mouse 100% of the time. Probably less than 25% of the time. Probably using your keyboard less than 25% of the time. It doesn't need to degrade experience OR selectively refresh part of the screen (which it certainly doesn't).
Anyone who has accidentally snapped the controller off a working LCD can tell you that the pixel capacitance keeps the colours approximately correct for about 10 seconds before it all becomes a murky shadowy mess...
So it makes sense you could cut the refresh time down to a second to save power...
Although one wonders if it's worth it when the backlight uses far more power than the control electronics...
It's for OLED screens, so there's no backlight, but also no persistence.
It's an LCD display.
These are self emissive pixels.
Edit: apparently not? Article says OLED with this tech will come in 2027, seems this panel it’s LCD
> A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink panel, which isn’t the prettiest to look at.
level of what? Power consumption? dude e-ink takes 0 power between refreshs.
And e-ink is pretty?
It just proved the author knows nothing about either technology.
Horrid website: forced cookies, invisible adverts (Mamma Mia, anyone?), and that thing where it’s a page of garbage links when you go back. I will never click a PC World URL again.
It’s truly unusable. What a mess the web has become.
Just activate Reader Mode immediately.
The real unanswered question is how much of this is the panel itself and how much is baked into Windows.
Saving battery is nice, but I'm not leaving Linux for that misery any time soon
Still waiting on e-ink laptops. This just seems like a no-brainer.
What these variable refresh panels are trying to do is kind of the "best of both worlds"
Sure dropping toward 1Hz could be huge. But the moment you scroll, watch video, or even have subtle UI animations, you're back in higher refresh territory
How is this a but? This is exactly what you want: the screen refreshes only when a new content appears or once a second.
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.
Is 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 modes where you are expecting a good long pause.
Targeting 1 Hz sounds like actually planning to clock down the link and the system framebuffer so they can run sustain low bandwidth in a more steady state fashion. Presumably you also want to clock down any app and GPU work to not waste time rendering screens nobody will see. This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank" that can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?
But why 1hz? Can’t the panel just leave the pixels on the screen for an arbitrary length of time until something triggers refresh? Only a small amount of my screen changes as I’m typing.
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> 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.
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Modern software regularly takes like 1 second to load anyways. 200ms is the minimum human reaction time, so adding 100ms would only add like 50% to the REPL user interaction. Something like 10Hz might be quite usable while minimally contributing to lag.
The idea of having a 60Hz screen is nice, but in practice it turns out that display refresh rate is not the bottleneck for most software.
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.
I wouldn't get a mini LED laptop for creative work. We have a mini LED TV, and manufacturers need to choose one of these two problems because of physical limitations:
- 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.
Tried to open this page on my mobile, good grief the changing advert spam overload kills the reading experience.
Firefox Android + ublock origin. There's ads on the internet? Wouldn't know.
Very weird to see people on hackernews of all places complain about ads on the internet. We solved this like 15 years ago.
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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.
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
Apple doesn't manufacture panels, they buy from others. I wonder how Apple can claim they have this feature.
Stroke CRT displays been able to do variable refresh rate since like the 80s, quite the omission there buddy.
What's the chance this will even work on Linux with GNOME?
Perhaps it can do 50Hz, which may be beneficial for emulating PAL systems.
You can use CRU (custom resolution utility) to add 50Hz to most screens.
Ostensibly any display capable of VRR should be able to operate at any range.
You don't need VRR for this, but there are some step functions of usefulness:
24Hz - now you can correctly play movies.
30Hz - NTSC (deinterlaced) including TV shows + video game emulators.
50Hz - (24 * 2 = 50 in Hollywood. Go look it up!) Now you can correctly play PAL and movies.
120Hz - Can play frame-accurate movies and NTSC (interlaced or not). Screw Europe because the judder is basically unnoticeable at 120Hz.
144Hz - Can play movies + pwn n00bs or something.
150Hz - Unobtanium but would play NTSC (deinterlaced), PAL and movies with frame level accuracy.
240Hz - Not sure why this is a thing, TBH. (300 would make sense...)
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So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
For sample-and-hold panel technologies like LCD and OLED, refresh is about updating the pixel state (color). There is a process that takes place for that even when the pixel data remains unchanged between frames. However, the pixels still need to emit light between refreshes, which for LCD is a backlight but for OLED are the pixel themselves. The light emission is often regulated using PWM at a higher frequency than the refresh rate. PWM frequency affects power consumption as well. Higher PWM frequency is better for the eyes, but also consumes more power.
OLED is fundamentally not sample and hold, because it is using PWM, right?
Ignoring switching costs, keeping a sample-and-hold LED at 0%, 50% and 100% brightness all cost zero energy. For an OLED, the costs are closer to linear in the duty cycle (again, ignoring switching costs, but those are happening much faster than the framerate for OLED, right?)
(Also, according to another comment, the panel manufacturer says this is TFT, not OLED, which makes a lot more sense.)
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E-ink displays can do this. That's why they're used in ereaders. Display in TFA OTOH emits light, so definately not.
It does, especially with LCDs like this, where the backlight is the primary driver of the power consumption of the panel.
I'm not even sure how they got their 48% figure. Sounds like a whole-system measurement, maybe that's the trick.
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.
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this is just regurgitating the manufacturer's claim. I believe it when I see it. Most of display energy use is to turn on the OLED/backlight. They're claiming, because our display flickers less, it's 48% more efficient now.
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Make a new phone with this please.
imagine what it will do to neo !
I once had an external monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz, and mouse movements were noticeably sluggish. It was part of a multi-monitor setup, so it was very obvious as I moved the mouse between monitors.
I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't be an early adopter.
Read the article.
The display has a refresh rate of 120hz when needed. The low refresh rate is for battery savings when there is a static image.
Variable refresh rate for power savings is a feature that other manufacturers already have (apple for one). So you might already be an early adopter.