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?
No, the majority of the energy consumption is in the backlight.
Maybe if it allowed you to switch to integrated graphics versus discrete, putting the GPU to sleep.
For just browsing, even integrated graphics has been plenty since the beginning of the internet, maybe with some exceptions when Flash gaming reached its pinnacle.
That might save a bit of power, but your dedicated GPU is usually in an idle/powered down state until your compositor gives it specific applications to accelerate. for Nvidia laptops this is what the PRIME/Optimus feature does.
Even back when I was in the laptop-repair game, this is the kinda stuff people would expect me to know about their stuff that I hated. I saw too many features come and go over the years to keep track of even half of it on behalf of others.
The display on my laptop is 4k and i can tell you i tried downscaling it was not as big a difference as simply turning the brightness down as low as was comfortable.
I don’t think it would matter that much since a desktop at 3k is very similar on modern hardware to a desktop at 1080.
But I’d be interested in someone who had the hardware to test this. Right now I use my laptop for school work, and in trying to squeeze every ounce of battery life I was running my display at 45hz instead of 60hz. I had a free day during the summer so I charged it up, ran a YouTube video on repeat and timed the battery life, then changed the display frequency and it was like a 2 minute difference. I also tried it while running a second 1080p monitor through hdmi and the difference was something like 10 minutes. Like, so small a difference or didn’t matter.
I don’t have the data sheet anymore so these numbers are anecdotal etc etc YMMV. The biggest change for me was buying a 65w PD battery bank and keeping that charged in my bag.
You’ll have to downscale the resolution unless you have super human vision. I suspect that the laptop is configured to ~150% ootb which would mean those battery estimates are based on that as well.
I don’t think upscaling the text/UI and downscaling the whole screen are the same thing.
The one usually works best with the other, though.
EDIT: nm, I see what you were getting at in their comment now. They also meant downscaling the Text/UI, not upscaling.
