Enabling “Reduce transparency” and “Reduce motion” in accessibility preferences also causes a considerable battery gain on Macs.
This is surprising because
1) The time - it's a full 2 hours and change - is not nothing.
2) It's not immediately obvious to many active computer users.
I know it's cool to pretend like nothing is surprising these days, but this is something that's legitimately surprising to many people.
So while it may be an obvious optimization to some people it doesn't seem to be implemented everywhere it could be. Or the DWM is more efficient than OS X's window composition stuff and there's no difference between windowed and fullscreen modes. Either option probably will annoy some fanboys one way or the other.
One thing that they may have done is to simply change the refresh rate of the display to match the played video's (akin to GSync/Freesync) in fullscreen mode. You can't do so in windowed mode since it will affect other applications, but when a fullscreen video is shown you can safely do so and it may save a bit of power.
> > Using the Windows Media Player in Bootcamp, power consumption was at a much higher 28.2 W, and we found absolutely no difference between regular and full screen playback.
Windows was less efficient overall, just with no difference in full-screen.
edit: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3023430/hardware/tested-vlc-v...
Case in point: I don't own a mobile Windows device so it doesn't matter to me. On my MBP (2880 x 1800) 4k wouldn't apply either. I'd run either XviD or DVD.
Some info on UWP power usage: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4iol5z/do_uwp_ap...
Apple started implementing variable refresh in iPads, but not on their Macs as far as I know.
Apparently only you and Apple know the secret to this because similar battery improvements weren't seen when trying this trick in Windows on the same machine. Microsoft should hire you.
So… it seems, in addition to Apple and me, Microsoft has also figured out the secret to having a battery life–conscious window manager.
Maybe it is related to "unredirect fullscreen" optimizations many Linux desktops employ. The people saying they don't get similar improvements in Windows by going fullscreen on the same hardware should run the test again with all the Windows 10 graphical improvements disabled.
[1]http://losca.blogspot.com/2012/11/game-performance-improveme...
Does the same test run on W10 or any linux distro do the same? I highly doubt it.
On Windows 10, it doesn’t compare, as the most heavy effect DWM has to deal with is alpha blending (status bar transparency). Microsoft dropped all of Aero to save battery life. We’ll see how it fares once the new design elements (with blurred backgrounds) start appearing in future betas.
https://www.apple.com/batteries/maximizing-performance/
http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac/17-tips-increase-mac-b...
There's a lot of junk and mostly obvious stuff in the second article.
Yes.
>All the window composition with frame-buffer effects takes a toll.
Which would be relevant if they were moving windows around, instead of just watching a movie in full screen mode vs typical window mode. So not much (if any) composition and no frame-buffer effects in place. At worst, the tiny rect with the clock on the menubar was changing.