Now we have become quite familiar with high-end display in the mobile space, as the first groundbreaking 90Hz devices last year have now evolved into even faster refreshing 120Hz smartphones that become the standard. While all of these devices deliver enhanced user experiences by providing extra smooth scrolling and gaming experiences, they all come with remarkable compromises when it comes to energy efficiency and battery life.
Today, Samsung Display announces that they are for the first time unveiling new generation panel panels that enable technological variable refresh rates, and reduce one of the biggest returns of today’s generation smartphones with high refresh speeds. The new technology makes its debut in the new Galaxy Note20 Ultra, which should be available to the public in just two short weeks.
Currently, the biggest problem for devices using a high-refresh display is the fact that all current implementations still function at a certain fixed refresh level, regardless of the screen content, which means they always hang at 60, 90 or 120Hz, depending on the smartphone.
This year’s smartphones with 120Hz display in particular have seen the effect of drastically increased power draw when operating below this higher refresh rate. Although these phones offer the ability to switch between different refresh rates, one cannot reproduce these mechanisms with display variable refresh rate (VRR), as they cannot be boring and quickly switch between these modes. As such, even if you display a fixed static screen, the display continues to refresh at 120Hz and has a large penalty mark, which is less than ideal.
Samsung’s new display panel deployed in the new Note20 Ultra is actually described as a VRR panel, with Samsung promising new modes for refresh rate, such as the ability to work on 120, 60, 30 and 10Hz modes. The latest super-low refresh rates have never been used in smartphones so far. Samsung describes that the screen will now be able to slow down to this new 10Hz mode when viewing static content.
“Existing smartphone panels offer only a fixed refresh rate. They can not automatically calibrate a phone’s refresh rate, which would result in image flicker caused by luminance differences at lower refresh rates. Samsung Display’s new backplane ** technology eliminates flicker for operating frequencies as low as 10Hz. “
Samsung describes the use of a new backplane technology to achieve this – although we have not received an official response from Samsung to our questions on the matter, there have been rumors that this is the generation in which the company introduced LTPO backplane technology , which enables higher switching performances and lower energy consumption.
Another question that remains to be answered is exact details about Samsung’s VRR operation, and whether it is an accurate implementation of adaptive sync technology and if it has a finer refresh rate granularity in the 10-120Hz above just the mentioned examples of 60 and 30Hz.
At present, such a VRR implementation would also require a deeper integration of software stack in the OS, GPU driver and display driver to enable a fully seamless operation that would work transparently on any kind of static or low-framerate content – we need to research this topic more once the Note20 Ultra devices are officially out.
Samsung claims that the new technology should reduce the power consumption of the phone by 22% in general use. Furthermore, there is a claim that it uses only 60% of the power of current monitors when operating in super-low 10Hz mode – although both figures do not indicate which baseline they are compared to (60 or 120Hz monitors ?).
In addition to making 120Hz a viable option for daily use without major battery impact, the new technology should have the potential to improve efficiency efficiently, even compared to current 60Hz displays, which will hopefully greatly increase ” the battery life in upcoming next-gen devices will increase.
