Procrastinato on 15 October 2009
| LordTheNightKnight said: "Your comment is anecdotal for the DS, bud. The DS's backlight is a good chunk of the power, but the same is not true for the PSP, nor will it be for these handhelds, which may even have OLED screens (which don't use a backlight at all). The PSP, by comparison, has a much larger portion of its power drain from the 333 MHz CPU and 160 MHz GPU, as well as the much larger memory (64 MB), etc. The backlight cost is about the same as the backlight(s) of the DS, but the CPU cost is radically different. The backlight cost doesn't go up, in line with the CPU. Your test would even show that a DSi, running DSiWare (as opposed to a DS game, which downclocks the CPU), gets less savings from the backlight redux than the DS does while playing DS games." Okay, it won't be the biggest battery drain, but that is not what "anecdotal" means. |
Generalizing that the the power drain on handhelds is "the backlight", based on observations of the DS, fits the defination of the word "anecdotal" almost to the letter.
anecdotal: "based on personal observation, case study reports, or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation: anecdotal evidence."
