VESA Display Power Management Signaling (VESA DPMS) is a

standard Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object ...

from the

VESA VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an American standards organization, technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve ...

consortium for power management of video monitors. Example usage includes turning off, or putting the monitor into standby after a period of idle time to save power. Some commercial displays also incorporate this technology.

History

VESA issued DPMS 1.0 in 1993, basing their work on the

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's (EPA) earlier

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power management Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power ...

specifications. Subsequent revisions were included in future

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Design

The standard defines how to signal the H-sync and V-sync pins in a standard

SVGA Super VGA (SVGA) or Extended VGA is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards that extended IBM's Video Graphics Array, VGA specification. When used as shorthand for a resolution, as VGA and XGA often are, SVGA refers to ...

monitor to trigger the monitor's power saving capabilities. DPMS defines four modes: normal, standby, suspended and off. When in the "off" state, some power may still be drawn in order to power indicator lights. The standard is:

Reception

By the late 1990s, most new monitors implemented at least one DPMS level. DPMS does not define implementation details of its various power levels; while in a CRT-based display the three steps could logically be mapped to three blocks to be shut down in order of increasing savings, thermal stress, and warm-up time (video amplifier, deflection, filaments) not all designs would be trivially adaptable to this model, and neither would the technologies that commercially succeeded CRT monitors. Partially due to this reason, most major operating environments (such as

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and the

MacOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

family) do not implement the 3-level DPMS specification either, offering only a single timer. Notable exceptions include

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

and the

XFCE Xfce or XFCE (pronounced as four individual letters, ) is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Xfce aims to be fast and Lightweight software, lightweight whil ...

Power Manager. DPMS competed with the alternative Nutek power saving system, in which the monitor recognizes a black picture produced by a

screensaver A screensaver (or screen saver) is a computer program that blanks the display screen or fills it with moving images or patterns when the computer has been idle for a designated time. The original purpose of screensavers was to prevent phosphor s ...

and enters a power saving mode after an appropriate delay. - implementation example.

References

External links

VESA Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) Standard
(requires purchase of the specification)
VESA Standards Listing
Display Power Management Signaling {{software-eng-stub

History

Design

Reception

See also

References

External links