alt Hacker NewsThis is an OLED display, so I don't think the control electronics are actually any less active. (They would be for LCD, which is where most of these low-refresh-rate optimizations make sense.)
The connection between the GPU and the display has been run length encoded (or better) since forever, since that reduces the amount of energy used to send the next frame to the display controller. Maybe by "1Hz" they mean they also only send diffs between frames? That'd be a bigger win than "1Hz" for most use cases.
But, to answer your question, the light emission and computation of the frames (which can be skipped for idle screen regions, regardless of frame rate) should dwarf the transmission cost of sending the frame from the GPU to the panel.
The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. (The next step in my analysis would involve computing the wattage requirements of the CPU, GPU and light emission, then comparing that to the KWh of the laptop battery + advertised battery life.
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Not OLED.
> LG Display is also preparing to begin mass production of a 1Hz OLED panel incorporating the same technology in 2027.
> The more I think about this, the less sense it makes
And yet, it’s the fundamental technology enabling always on phone and smartwatch displays
The intent of this is to reduce the time that the CPU, GPU, and display controller is in an active state (as well as small reductions in power of components in between those stages).
> This is an OLED display
The LG press release states that it's LCD/TFT.
https://news.lgdisplay.com/en/2026/03/lg-display-becomes-wor...