Hi KateG ,
Thanks for not giving up on me yet - I know that walls of text can be brutal 🙂
I don't mean to overexplain this, because I'm definitely very far from an expert, and I could be wrong about details. But basically I'm drawing the parallel to hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding.
An example with which we might be more familiar is like watching videos from the internet. If you would pull an old laptop off the shelf and watch a video, you might find that playing the video uses like 25%+ of CPU and kills the battery quickly. A more modern laptop would have a much easier time playing that same video. The reasons the modern laptop would be so much more efficient with playing the video are many, but one big reason is that the modern laptop would likely have hardware-accelerated video decoding such as Intel Quick Sync, or Nvidia NVDEC, etc. As long as the software being used supports using hardware acceleration, and as long as the hardware supports the codec in use, the specialized hardware can be used to very efficiently decode the video (low CPU/GPU usage).
So, tying it back to my question here: is there some particular hardware which can run Screen Blanking notably more efficiently - similar to how hardware with Quick Sync or NVDEC can play videos much more efficiently? Maybe the GoTo developers might say that LMI is using a certain codec, or that Screen Blanking is most optimized for a certain API, and so therefore a particular generation of graphics cards (or newer) would run things notably more efficiently?