We changed the LG G3's display resolution to 1080p - we got superb performance and negligible battery life increases

Introduction

What's this idea about? As you probably know, a screen is comprised of “pixels”. Each pixel is one point of light, and that one point of light is capable of representing any color. The idea is to make the G3's processor and graphics unit deal with less pixels. The G3's screen resolution is a fixed 1440x2560 pixels, which means that normally, the display expects the smartphone to feed a whopping 3,686,400 pixels to it!

If we force the LG G3 to work in 1080x1920 resolution, the display's fixed resolution will stay the same, but much less pixels - 2,073,600, to be precise - will be fed to it. This will result in a considerable load being taken off the hardware. It's a bulletproof technique, one that every PC gamer has applied to coax higher frame rates out of their rig, for example. But won't that degrade the image quality? After all, the LG G3's screen is made exclusively for Quad-HD resolution!

When we force the smartphone into 1080p resolution, we're making it put 2 million pixels in a room for 3.7 million pixels. This means the graphics unit has to stretch those 2m pixels into occupying space for 3.6m pixels, or the picture will look wonky. This technique is called interpolation, and is known to cause the image quality to degrade. Here's why - when the LG G3 is set to 1440x2560, each of the 3.7 million pixels it outputs takes exactly one pixel from its screen. That's a perfect 1-to-1 match. But when we change the resolution to 1080p, each pixel will be stretched into 2 pixels or more, and we'll no longer have that perfect matching. However, we are still left with many, many pixels that are crammed into so little physical space (5.5 inches by diagonal) that the result of interpolation is barely noticeable.