Would reducing screen resolution improve the battery life?

Would reducing the resolution of a laptop's screen make it last longer? For example, if I purchase the Surface Pro 4 (2736x1824) and reduce it to 1920x1280 or 2160x1440 or if I buy the New XPS 13 (From 3200x1800 to 1600x900) or the New XPS 15 9550 with the 4K display, would reducing the resolution to 1080p improve battery life?

How badly would it affect the clarity of the image I see?

Also, if the answer to the above question is yes, how much longer would the battery last?

 

no, just turning the brightness down would help. reducing the resolution just mimics a change ana all pixels are still in use. for example a 4k screen running at 1080 is a simple case of a pixel becoming 2 pixels high by 2 wide ( 4 in total )

 

No, and it would make the image blurrier, esp. text.

 

In theory yes, reducing screen resolution would slightly reduce power consumption BUT only in graphic intensive applications like games. Mostly because GPU would require less power for screen rendering. In standard scenario there will be almost no change.

 

Not only would it make your display look worse (as explained before), but it won't actually do anything at all (or anything noticeable) for battery life. You still have 3200*1800 physical pixels which are being powered, regardless of if you're running at 1800p or 900p.

Turn down the brightness on the display if you're worried about battery life.

 

Ok. Thanks a lot for the help, guys.

 

Resolution doesn't reduce GPU power consumption in games.

A GPU is going to operate at 100% clock rate (and therefore 100% power draw) regardless if you're running 1080p or 4K. The only difference is the number of frames per second that the GPU can output at those resolutions. But regardless of framerate, the GPU will be operating at 100%.

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The frame buffer needs to be rendered to first somehow, and reducing resolution would reduce the amount of work done before the final scaling for output. Won't make much difference on the desktop though.

You can limit the FPS, in which case it does help. One could also argue that with lower resolution the situation becomes more CPU-dependent, so the GPU would spend more time waiting for the CPU and less time rendering, which at least on some combos would reduce power consumption.

 

Wrong. Checked experimentally right now. Run GTA4 on an old machine with GTX260 for 15 minutes. In FullHD GPU cooling system operated at 65%-70% constantly, GPU temp 77°C. At 800x600 GPU cooling system floated at 45%-60%, GPU temp 65-68°C avg. Less heat dissipation means less power consumption - direct correlation.

I am not stating that lowering screen resolution would significantly increase battery life. Even if it does, it will be negligible.

 

Reducing resolution can actually INCREASE power consumption in games because it is doing more frames per second. This can be proven consistently game after game by measuring actual power draw of the machine. I'll provide results in a bit.

 

Right, because higher FPS = higher CPU usage

 

Right, but without showing actual results, people don't seem to believe it.