Maxing play time : battery ratio

[Fefo]

More than once I wanted to play some games during those slow hours, but my less than stellar battery life doesn't let me. How can I set-up DraStic to minimize it's hunger? My guesses:

- Forced frameskip: Since it's not rendered, it lessens the C/GPU load (more skipping = less battery?);
- No filtering: less load too;
- Hi-3D: less cores, less work, etc;
- Sound disabled: Less load (higher latency = less battery?).

Am I right? Any more that I can do?

[TkSilver]

First thing to maximize almost any android device's battery life your brightness setting makes the possibly the biggest difference. After that I would have to know far more about the way DraStic utilizes the devices CPU to make any other recomendations.

If you are rooted and you can make changes to your kernel you could also lower the max clock frequency, which might have a far bigger impact on how drastic uses your cpu then any setting in drastic ever could. Though please do your reaserxh before hand and make a full nand backup if you plan on doing anything like that.

However if you want an easy solution that would allow you to play with any settings at any brightness then just buy an external battery pack/charger which can increase your usable battery by anything from a few hundred mAh to tens of thousands of mAh.

[Exophase]

Hires 3D is probably the single biggest added drain on the battery.

[Fefo]

TK:
I can't UC/UV my device much further without making it unstable, and if I could it might do worse. So for now outside of DraStic I just mantain standard Android battery saving: low brightness, less/good conection signal, etc.

I've been looking for a external battery for other reasons, but didn't found anything reliable and available.

Exo:
Certainly, but when skipping is the dropped frame still rendered? It might not be a huge difference, but when every drop matters I can accept a choppier but longer gameplay. Same for the others.

[Exophase]

Exo:
Certainly, but when skipping is the dropped frame still rendered? It might not be a huge difference, but when every drop matters I can accept a choppier but longer gameplay. Same for the others.

It's not rendered. However, the geometry engine's frame workload is still emulated even if it contributes to a frame that isn't rendered.

Hires 3D makes the 3D render time about 3x slower and the 2d render time about 2x slower (very rough numbers, vary from game to game). The 3D part will tend to take a lot more CPU time than the 2D part, so let's say overall render time is a lot closer to 3x than 2x.

That means that hires with manual frameskip 2 would be a sort of similar load vs no hires w/o frameskip. If you turn off hires 3D and turn on manual frameskip the end result would use less power still, but you'll get diminishing returns pretty quickly. I wouldn't bother with frameskip higher than 2 or 3. Maybe try it by seeing how long your phone takes to drain with some game going into attract mode and see how much battery life improves empirically.

[Q8-V08]

Bluetooth & Wifi are the biggest battery drainers alone make sure to playing in Aeroplane mode.

[kaikun97]

TK:
I can't UC/UV my device much further without making it unstable, and if I could it might do worse. So for now outside of DraStic I just mantain standard Android battery saving: low brightness, less/good conection signal, etc.

I've been looking for a external battery for other reasons, but didn't found anything reliable and available.

Exo:
Certainly, but when skipping is the dropped frame still rendered? It might not be a huge difference, but when every drop matters I can accept a choppier but longer gameplay. Same for the others.

If you can find an MBuyNow brand extended battery, they arw good. I have a 6500mAH battery for my S4 mini, its fatter (and therfore comes with a custom back plate) but better than the stock 1900mAH battery

[Fefo]

Huh, so by decreasing responsiveness I can increase graphical fidelity. Cue surprise by dumb. Anyway, your math means that if I set skipping to 2, reducing framerate from 60 to 20FPS, Hi-3D become equivalent to native without skipping. And due to how forced skipping works diminishing returns are caused by the skip-fps curve: 0-60, 1-30, 2-20, 3-15, 5-10, 9-6...

I'll be doing some tests. If I can bring some meaningful data I'll post that.

---

Wi-Fi doesn't cause much drain unless I'm downloading huge files, or on a bad connection. It's been long since I used BT so I don't remember its impact. Poor mobile network, 3G and 4G are also big drainers. And for those on hot places (me), heat make things worse.

Thanks for your sugestion kaikun, and for everyone's help.

[reeve]

I've been looking for a external battery for other reasons, but didn't found anything reliable and available.

I don't know where you live so I don't know the availability of the product, but I've been using one of these http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-PB1040 ... B00G0AMUE8 and it is great.

[Fefo]

Thanks reeve. I already heard great things of that pack, but I wanted a case-like and Nexus 4 is picky on acessories.

Looks like I'll have a full week so no much play for me, but so far my test with no Hi-3D and 2 frames skipped was promising. Barely any heat and very reduced drain, at the cost of a very jerky gameplay. Not advised for twitchy games, I guess.