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"Turning Off" Retina

H

hfmutlu

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 28, 2012
15
0
Lately, my iPT 4 has been starting to get really slow. I did a restore a while back before iOS6. Even though I've been reading the iPad mini vs iPad 3/4 threads, I realized how retina isn't that important to me. I would prefer longer battery life and speed, but still want the camera (not going back a gen). I do not have enough reasons or excuses to upgrade to an iPT 5 even though it would be nice.

Anyway, my main question is... Wouldn't it be nice to have an option to turn retina ON or OFF from settings? For example, under normal use you could have it on, but on a long car ride when you're listening to music, you would want battery life.

Thanks for any responses or help!
(BTW, my ipod is jailbroken running on 5.1
 
Even then it would just display in "pixel doubled" mode and would still have the same number of physical pixels.
 
Nermal said:
Yes, but you're still powering the display etc. I'm not a hardware engineer but I'd guess that the savings in battery life wouldn't amount to much.
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But you would still get hypothetically get 4X the speed, which would handle apps like real street racing with much more ease
 
XboxMySocks said:
Eh.... no. If you're listening to music your screen is off anyway :s?
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What about using safari and music at the same time? If There were only 25% of the pixels working, then the unused gpu power could go to supporting the apps instead of having them crash as usual.
 
hfmutlu said:
If There were only 25% of the pixels working
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The pixels just don't turn off.

What the retina MacBook Pro does is *scale* differently. The same pixels are still being used.

It wouldn't really make a difference. Change the resolution of your laptop, and you'll see that battery life will be the same. Sure, lowering resolution might help games on laptop, but that's mostly because you're playing a game not properly designed for your hardware. Most things on the iPhone 4 (including iOS) are designed for it.

I doubt anything would happen.
 
you cannot turn off retina...
its not like if you disabled it, the pixels would turn off...you would still be driving the entire screen..
 
The resolution would be lower, and thus there'd be less stress on the GPU, so scrolling and games would be smoother and the battery life would improve whilst doing those things. For Safari browsing or listening to music, you won't see any difference in battery life or performance as those two things aren't stressful for the GPU.
 
There was a bug with some jailbreak tweaks that caused iOS to think it was running on a non-retina screen, when it actually had a retina screen. The result was the screen went to the top left corner of the screen. Because that's all the more pixels the screen was given to display.

Yes, in this mode games and other graphical tasks would preform much better. That's why the 3Gs has much higher framerates then the iPhone 4 and can play graphic heavy games more smoothly.
 
If it's been getting slower over time, then that means you've just been building up a lot of gunk in the file system. Delete apps and files you don't use anymore. Since you're jailbroken, download and run iCleaner from Cydia.

Do you close your background apps regularly? Download WeeKillBackground from Cydia to add a one-tap kill-all to Notification Center.

When was the last time you did a reboot or hard reset?

If it still feels slow, do a complete wipe and restore.
 
I had to click on the link when I saw this.

Unfortunately I have nothing positive to contribute in this thread. :D
 
VTECaddict said:
If it's been getting slower over time, then that means you've just been building up a lot of gunk in the file system.
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^ This. Not sure how the OP concluded that the retina display is the problem aside from a lack of understanding of causality.

hfmutlu said:
For example, under normal use you could have it on, but on a long car ride when you're listening to music, you would want battery life.
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You'd see a much better gain by plugging it in.
 
I think this thread is funny.................................................. :D

I don't think it would be any good if you could choose a specific resolution like you do on a laptop or desktop, doesn't make any sense to me on a iPhone/iPod touch.
And the retina display is hardware.
 
hfmutlu said:
But can't you have it do something similar to what the rMBP does?
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What you are asking it to do is scaling. This would actually be more taxing for the processor. The rMBP runs its fastest at native unscaled resolution which can only be activated with 3rd party software. I have one and it runs the smoothest at 2880x1800. Everything is too small though.

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mKTank said:
The resolution would be lower, and thus there'd be less stress on the GPU, so scrolling and games would be smoother and the battery life would improve whilst doing those things. For Safari browsing or listening to music, you won't see any difference in battery life or performance as those two things aren't stressful for the GPU.
Click to expand...

Go to your computer and try to lower the resolution without changing the size of interface elements.
 
hfmutlu said:
But you would still get hypothetically get 4X the speed, which would handle apps like real street racing with much more ease
Click to expand...

The retina display has more pixels than previous displays. You can't just turn off half of them. They all have to be addressed by the GPU. Scaling actually takes interface elements at their native size and makes them bigger or smaller. So, if you scale up, icons and buttons and other things become larger.
 
DaffyDuck said:
What you are asking it to do is scaling. This would actually be more taxing for the processor. The rMBP runs its fastest at native unscaled resolution which can only be activated with 3rd party software. I have one and it runs the smoothest at 2880x1800. Everything is too small though.

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Go to your computer and try to lower the resolution without changing the size of interface elements.
Click to expand...

"I'm not trying to scale it differently, but i was thinking that if 4 pixels could represent 1 pixel, wouldn't the gpu have that much less to control?

This was just an idea, no need to get worked up about it. I just wanted to know if anyone thought it would be useful?
 
hfmutlu said:
"I'm not trying to scale it differently, but i was thinking that if 4 pixels could represent 1 pixel, wouldn't the gpu have that much less to control?

This was just an idea, no need to get worked up about it. I just wanted to know if anyone thought it would be useful?
Click to expand...

I understand what the OP is saying. He wants to run the iPhone at 320x480 on a 640x960 display so the GPU has to push 4X less pixels giving better performance.

Yes, I have done this on my rMBP, run the display at 1440x900. Animations are much faster but the screen looks ugly.

And to the OP, no, iOS does not allow you to change resolutions. But I do recall some people with a jailbreak bug that only filled quarter of the screen.

IMG_0004.png
 
Tea-Aholic said:
I understand what the OP is saying. He wants to run the iPhone at 320x480 on a 640x960 display so the GPU has to push 4X less pixels giving better performance.

Yes, I have done this on my rMBP, run the display at 1440x900. Animations are much faster but the screen looks ugly.

And to the OP, no, iOS does not allow you to change resolutions. But I do recall some people with a jailbreak bug that only filled quarter of the screen.

Image
Click to expand...

Thank You! This is exactly what i was trying to say!
 
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