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?

  • vole@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I’d think so. 3k is so many pixels to compute and send 60 times a second.

    But this video says the effect on battery life in their test was like 6%, going from 4k to 800x600. I can imagine that some screens are better at saving power when running at lower resolutions… but what screen manufacturer would optimize energy consumption for anything but maximum resolution? 🤔 I guess the computation of the pixels isn’t much compared to the expense of having those physical dots. But maybe if your web browser was ray-traced? … ?!

    Also, if you take a 2880x1800 screen and divide by 2 (to avoid fractional scaling), you get 1440x900 (this is not 1440p), which is a little closer to 720p than 1080p.

    • Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
      0·
      10 days ago

      But you don’t lower the amount of pixels you use. You just up the amount of pixels used to display a “pixel” when lowering the resolution. So the same amount of power is going to be used to turn those pixels on.