Stefan Mileschin

High refresh rate displays in smartphones are all the rage in 2020, but the new exciting feature is still in its infancy in terms of hardware implementations. Currently there’s still a lot of caveats when using the higher refresh rate, particularly a large impact on the battery life of the phone.

A few weeks ago we covered the characteristic in Samsung’s Galaxy S20 series, noting how it results in a quite large bump in the power consumption of the device, even when seemingly not actually displaying any dynamic content on-screen.

The new OnePlus 8 Pro is another 120Hz flagship device that’s been recently released, and we finally managed to get our hands on a sample. Curiosity got the best of me and the power consumption of the phone at different refresh rates was amongst the first things I tested, particularly because the phone offers the 120Hz refresh rate at a native QHD+ software rendering resolution – something Samsung’s Galaxy S20 series can’t do.

Observing the input power of the phone for a more graphical representation of the different modes, we immediately see that OnePlus’ 120Hz mode incurs a similar power jump to that of the Galaxy S20. The figures here aren’t quite correct as the phone’s power usage when connected to USB is unusually high so don’t pay too much attention to those numbers – just at the differences between the modes.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15765...l-power-hungry