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A simple trick to conserve laptop battery power
Authored by: stutemp1 on Dec 08, '05 01:37:37PM

I have no idea if this is relevant at all, but in the old days when video RAM was scarce, setting the screen to B & W or 16 grey scale would give a noticable increase in performance over using thousands or millions of colors in the first color Macs and we did this on all of the ones used as servers. So perhaps the power savings has something to do with the fewer number of calculations needed to be performed by the CPU to create the colors? If so maybe this might help laptop batter consumption when colors aren't critical like when wordprocessing.



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A simple trick to conserve laptop battery power
Authored by: tooki on Dec 12, '05 09:56:49AM
Not likely. OS X uses 32-bit color internally. Rendering out to a lower bit depth actually requires more CPU (and possibly RAM; this detail I don't know) to calculate. Contrast adjustments, on the other hand, appear to be done in the GPU as gamma curves, which are "free".

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