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?<p>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.
Haven't phones, watches and tablets been using low refresh rates to enable battery improvements for a while?<p>The Apple Watch Series 5 (2019) has a refresh rate down to 1Hz.<p>M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable refresh rate (2024):<p><a href="https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display-oled/" rel="nofollow">https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display...</a>
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.
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.<p>Less of a problem for iphones that unlikely to stay for a week in the same place plugged in and unused.
iPad Pro only goes down to 10 FPS. This may be the display of the upcoming MacBook Pro.
Dell needs to sell these XPS. The AI button doesn't do the trick, so battery life may do it.
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. <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/14/intel_demos_panel_self_refresh_display_tech/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/14/intel_demos_panel_sel...</a><p>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.<p>One factor that might be interesting, I don't know if there's a <i>partial</i> 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.
> LG’s press release leaves several questions unanswered, including the source of the “Oxide” name...<p>> Source: <a href="https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432</a> [2026-03-23]<p>---<p>> 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.<p>> Source: <a href="https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive-ultra-low-power-laptop-display" rel="nofollow">https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive...</a> [2025-12-29]<p>---<p>> History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. ~ Hilary Mantel
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.
As soon as I saw this announced, I wondered if this is why we haven’t seen OLED MacBook Pro yet.<p>Apple already uses similar tech on the phones and watches.
So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
E-ink displays can do this. That's why they're used in ereaders. Display in TFA OTOH emits light, so definately not.
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.
Is this materially different from panel self refresh?
A low refresh rate probably still requires the same display-side framebuffer as PSR.<p>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.<p>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.
When PSR or adaptive refresh rate systems suspend or re-clock the link, this requires reengineering of the link and its controls. All of this evolved out of earlier display links, which evolved out of earlier display DACs for CRTs, which continuously scanned the system framebuffer to serialize pixel data into output signals. This scanning was synchronized to the current display mode and only changed timings when the display mode was set, often which a disruptive glitch and resynchronization period. Much of this design cruft is still there, including the whole idea of "sync to vblank".<p>When you have display persistence, you can imagine a very different architecture where you address screen regions and send update packets all the way to the screen. The screen in effect becomes a compositor. But then you may also want transactional boundaries, so do you end up wanting the screen's embedded buffers to also support double or triple buffering and a buffer-swap command? Or do you just want a sufficiently fast and coordinated "blank and refill" command that can send a whole screen update as a fast burst, and require the full buffer to be composited upstream of the display link?<p>This persistence and selective addressing is actually a special feature of the MIP screens embedded in watches etc. They have a link mode to address and update a small rectangular area of the framebuffer embedded in the screen. It sends a smaller packet of pixel data over the link, rather than sending the whole screen worth of pixels again. This requires different application and graphics driver structure to really support properly and with power efficiency benefits. I.e. you don't want to just set a smaller viewport and have the app continue to render into off-screen areas. You want it to focus on only rendering the smaller updated pixel area.
> This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank" that can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?<p>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.
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.<p>I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't be an early adopter.