[ltp] Direct Rendering's affect on battery life?

[Hunter Fuller]

On  05 Apr 2006, at 10:12 AM, Guarded Identity wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I finally found a background that works well with my pseudo- 
> transparent
> terminal emulator (it's really difficult to find one that uniformly  
> contrasts
> well with cyan, green, blue, magenta, and red!).  Everything was  
> working
> really nicely, so I thought I'd look into what was possible to make  
> it even
> nicer... so I played around with installing fglrx, but before that  
> just
> turning on DRM/DRI (which I really hadn't been using previously) to  
> see if I
> could get anything out of XComposite, XRender, and XDamage.  I  
> didn't get
> that far with fglrx, but I /did/ notice that DRI finally worked on  
> the Radeon
> Mobility 9600 that's in my T42 (DRI wasn't supported for the 9600  
> the last
> time I played around with it).
How did you do it? I can't get it to work with the 9200 in my R51.
>
> I assume DRI is nice for mplayer or something... actually, I was  
> getting by
> before fine without it.
It's good for anything with lots of motion, especially 3D games.
>
> One thing, though, that I think I noticed, was that my power was  
> draining
> faster... by about 1.0 to 1.5 Watts (so not exactly an  
> insignificant amount).
> However, I'm not so certain of this power loss; power dissipation  
> isn't
> exactly constant, and there's a lot of settling and averaging to  
> account for.
> I didn't exactly run a statisical experiment... just eyeballed it.
>
> I guess I'm wondering if anyone in this forum:
>
>     1) agrees that DRM/DRI does indeed cause a power loss, and if so
Indeed, that's most of the reason why I want it... when I'm in X on  
my notebook the fan is constantly on and my power draw is large.
>     2) knows a way to set up X to curtail the loss.
I tried fglrx, but it broke... my panel appears to be filling with a  
white liquid from the corners when it is activated! WTF?
> Feel free to throw in any other comments you might have too; I'm  
> not trying to
> make this too targeted a question.
>
> - Sukant
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