There have been several threads about people saying the AMD Framework 13 minimum brightness is too high, but until now no one has said what “too high” means.
I finally found a source that did an empirical measurement of the minimum brightness possible on the AMD Framework 13.
According to RTINGS, the measured minimum brightness for the AMD Framework 13 is 21 nits, over double the brightness of the 9 nits for the Intel Framework 13. For reference to the gold standard, RTINGS measures the MacBook Air as having a minimum of 2 nits.
@Matt_Hartley can you tell us why the AMD Framework’s minimum brightness is so high compared to Intel Frameworks and how it can be lowered to the same standard as Intel Frameworks, or better yet the same as the MacBook Air?
Rtings has not tested the latest Intel Framework laptop.
The latest Framework 13 laptops (ie. AMD and 13th Gen Intel) use the BOE NE135GXM-N61 display panel.
The older Intel Framework laptops use the BOE NE135FBM-N41 display panel.
The main difference is that the NE135GXM-N61 has a matte finish, however when I looked through the datasheets I noticed a that the BOE NE135FBM-N41 can supposedly go down to 1% of max brightness whereas the NE135GXM-N61 can only go down to 5% of max brightness.
Plugging in the max brightness for each panel (415 nits for the BOE NE135FBM-N41 and 400 nits for the BOE NE135GXM-N61) that calculates to the BOE NE135FBM-N41 having a rated brightness range of 4 to 415 nits while the NE135GXM-N61 has a rated brightness range of 20 to 400 nits.
If the minimum brightness is a major concern for you Framework does sell the BOE NE135FBM-N41 on their marketplace. You can also buy it cheaper elsewhere, however then it doesn’t come with the required mounting bracket so you’d need to transfer the mounting bracket (which goes on with adhesive as the panel doesn’t have mounting holes). Or if you get the factory seconds B-stock those come with the BOE NE135FBM-N41.
At one point I found a site that had the datasheets and got indexed by Google, but those pages seem to be down now. I just remember the 5% min brightness on the newer panel and 1% min brightness on the older panel (and I think one had 0.1W higher rated power consumption).
I might still have them downloaded on my old laptop (the one I used prior to getting my Framework Laptop 16). I’ll try to check later to confirm.
Someone has created a kernel patch that overrides the minimum brightness set at the firmware level. Is this a direction that Framework could take for a permanent solution?
We are currently discussing a firmware fix with our vendor (Lowering the minimum setting on a display descriptor table). But there is some concern that this will impact the AMD varibright setting on windows which we are confirming first.
Please note that the current setting is the lowest allowed setting per the datasheet of our 16in panel. So we would only lower it for the 13in in firmware.