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Clausewitz

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 30, 2015
124
26
Hi, sorry for yet another battery/energy related thread but I have been observing for quite a while now that scrolling on MS Word, Mendeley & some other apps, particularly that involve PDF files, causes peak in energy impact on my MBP. Should this be considered normal?
 
Why would you think it's not normal? Scrolling requires the application to rapidly redraw its content, and in case of PDFs it has to read, interpret and execute a potentially large amount of vector drawing commands. It's a computationally intense process. Instead, jut maintaining the already displayed content is essentially free because the page has been drawn and can be saved as an in-memory image that can be displayed indefinitely. That is also why you see CPU/GPU spikes when scrolling (the app needs to quickly produce new images of its contents) that disappear when you stop scrolling (the app can use previously produced and stored image to display the contents).
 
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