Wold my laptop battery last longer if I turned the graphical settings in my game to low?
yes. Next question?
Proof of particular games settings significantly increasing battery time.
>>3
logic. if it spends more time doing more work, it's going to use more power. by reducing the graphical settings, it's going to reduce the workload.
Wrong. It's going to be using graphics hardware, RAM, CPU and everything else whatever the settings. Lowering the brightness on your screen would have a greater effect.
on the laptop you can change the battery settings. I know when i set mine to "power saver" my game starts to lag- i would imagine that would have more impact since if you turn down the graphical settings, the computer may just use the extra power to do something else and thus you end up with very little change in battery life.
if you change the battery power setting, however, it limits the amount of battery the computer can use at any one time.
at least, that's my theory. i'm probably wrong
That's pretty much it, and it does that by limiting voltages on different parts of hardware and slowing fans for "power saver". Changing game settings does not do that.
Even so, code which constantly idles uses less power than code doing multiplication. That has already been proven in the past (as for an underlying reason, it's something to do with entropy increasing in order to perform computations.)
>>5
When I'm doing stuff on my laptop that requires little power (such as surfing simple websites or word processing), the CPU fan does not spin because the CPU doesn't need much heat displacement at those activity levels. The CPU/GFXU does very little work and so does not use much electricity to achieve those tasks.
When I play a 3d game, the CPU fan gets really noisy. This is because it has to work harder to displace the heat that the CPU produces. The CPU performs more activities which consumes more electricity which creates more heat. If you lower the graphical requirements of the game, the computer has a smaller data set to work with which means it doesn't have to use as much energy to calculate the game which means it uses less electricity to power the laptop.