FHD vs. WQHD on a WQHD display

amko98 · February 17, 2020

Hey everybody!

So I stumbled upon a video on yt that was comparing the battery life on two s10+ phones, one set to WQHD, the other to FHD, and eventually it showed no impact on the battery!

Which got me thinking - how does that actually work? I mean, do half of the pixels actually turn off (which I doubt, since there was no apparent difference in battery life) or are they dimmed or something like that?

If anyone could explain this to me, or at least point me in the right direction so I can do the research on my own, I would appreciate it!

amko98 · February 18, 2020

On 2/17/2020 at 1:25 PM, huilun02 said:

Majority of the power is to used to operate the pixels. Rendering at a lower resolution doesn't change much because the image is stretched and every pixel still has to work to produce light.

However on an old screen it makes a world of difference between running a standard video vs another video of same quality and length but showing just a black background.

So an old screen can be a huge benefit if you run a UI or background image that is pure black.

Running a casual vs demanding game however, is a different story. The GPU has to work far harder to render complex 3d scenes. Assuming the image output is the same, running the more demanding game will obviously consume more power and generate more waste heat.

Thanks a lot for the answer!

But the emphasis of my question was supposed to be on the actual technology behind that process (setting the screen resolution to, say, 1080p, on a 1440p phone), not the power consumption, I just mentioned that because that's what got me thinking about the workings of different resolutions in the first place..

I may have formulated the question improperly

Darkseth · February 18, 2020

It's called "Scaling" or "Interpolation".

This is the by Far best article i found to explain this: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/232957/1080p-on-4k-display

In this Case, this Scaling doesn't just happen on a Pixel-basis, but even on a sub-pixel basis. Which is why 1080p on a native 1440p screen doesn't really look that bad (almost no visible difference).
But maybe it's also because the pixel density is so high, that you don't see the shortcomings of this Scaling method.

That Article "stole" also from LTT Forum, which you can see here: