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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> Gaming: 2.4 hours of usage on average

> Social: 2.2 hours of usage on average

> Productivity: 1.5 hours minutes [sic] of usage on average

How is this accurate? What kind of "Productivity" tasks are people doing inside a Quest if it uses more power/battery than gaming? Also, "Social" drawing more power than "Gaming" too? Something seems weird.

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I'm pretty sure productivity refers mixed reality stuff such as projecting virtual screens and objects in the environment around you.[1] That requires more computation than rendering a fully virtual scene.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOp7QrBs0c

I wonder if that's AR, and the cameras/processing involved are what use more power.

Microsoft Teams can absolutely use more battery than many games.

Ditto for Instagram.

Isn't that "social" though?

It’s certainly not productivity.

To be fair, I could only game for 15 min before getting dizzy anyways

Going by how my Macbook's battery life evaporates with 10 Chrome tabs + Slack + Zoom, I believe it. Gaming is definitely less load than multiple windows of modern work apps.

Compared to playing a game which would definitely use both GPU and CPU, instead of mostly just CPU?

Almost every such app uses GPU as well.

True, but nowhere near the level that a game would. As an example, it'll be hard to find a productivity/office application that is bottlenecked by the GPU, while for games, it's relatively easy to find.

The modern web is pretty taxing on a GPU... Plenty of webpages have 100+ layers to composite together...

Sure, but those only get rendered when stuff is actually changing on the screen, otherwise it stands still, compared to games which would (usually at least) continue to render N FPS no matter if the screen is identical or not compared to previous frame.

If your MacBook battery is recent and lasting for less than 8 hours, you’re doing something very unusual.

There are also apps that basically render your desktop screen in VR.

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