Isn’t rescaling usually done by the display driver? I am fairly certain this is the case for external displays. Are laptop displays any different?
Edit: with “display driver” I mean the hardware chip behind the display panel, dedicated to converting a video signal to the electrical signals necessary to turn on the individual pixels.
I am not sure… in the case I’m referring to, they were lagging also when scrolling. But it was React, so native browser rendering. And they were actually very large tables, so we had to do some funny things like viewport culling (see react-window).
For what it’s worth I’ve never had any similar performance issues with tables in Flutter (web with the canvas-based render engine, not Android) when applying the same culling technique, they just ran fine at any resolution. Different hardware, though, so it’s not an apple to apple comparison.
In any case just to be safe I would personally assume less pixels = less work = less power = more battery life. My opinion is very unscientific though.