rMBP lowering the resolution to help battery life/less CPU usage?

[kaicrawf]

Hi! I'm running on a late 2014 Retina MacBook Pro 13" which is a 2560x1600 display (I think). When you go into System Preferences on the display options the "Default for Display" is said to "look like 1280x800".

I have QuickRes which is a piece of software that lets you change your resolution to just about any you want so I changed it to 1280x800 and it doesn't look THAT bad. Basically I want to know if keeping the resolution lowered to this would make day-to-day tasks less CPU demanding and give me more battery life? If it would make a significant difference I'd get used to the uglier resolution but if it wouldn't affect it that much I'd go back to retina lol

Thanks for any replies!

 

[brewmonkey]

I would be surprised if that dramatically improved battery life, but you can easily perform the experiment yourself with and without QuickRes enabled to see if there's any difference. Let us know what happens!

 

[DeltaMac]

You probably won't see much benefit for increased battery life from a lower resolution.
Turning down screen brightness will give you a noticeable improvement in battery life.

 

[leman]

No, turning down resolution would not give you any substantial energy savings, except in possibly very rare scenarios. Most of the time, the image on the screen remains stationary. Redraws happen fairly rarely.

 

[matt_on_a_mtn]

You may actually lose battery life by forcing to a scaled 1280x800 over Apple's retina version or built in scaling, simply because it's a third party app doing it.