Does anyone know how much the refresh rate on the screen affects power draw independent of frame rate a game is putting out? So for example, on the new OLED models with the unified control, at 40FPS or 45FPS, it sets the screen to 80 or 90 Hz respectively. I’m wondering whether there’d be any significant power savings from disabling the unified slider and setting it to 40FPS and 40Hz?
Or does the power saving from the 40Hz setting that’s been so popular on the original Deck mainly just come from the GPU and CPU savings from not having to render as many frames, and the refresh rate change is mainly just to enable 40FPS to display smoothly rather than being a substantial power saving in and of itself?
Any insight or testing any of you have done or seen done by others would be of interest! I assume the frame doubling the new Deck does by default must be OK on battery since longer runtime is a big selling point of the new Deck and that’s how Valve handles it by default, but curious whether it makes any real difference.
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I asked and was told that a higher refresh rate doesn’t consume any significant amount of extra power by itself. The power consumed by generating the frame is much higher than drawing it.
So running 40/40 and 40/80 should be basically the same in terms of power use.