Animated or video: what costs you battery

They are not the same job

A live wallpaper is either a video being decoded or a scene being drawn. Those go through different parts of the machine, which is why asking whether live wallpapers drain a battery does not have one answer.

Video wallpapers

MP4, MOV and M4V files play through AVPlayer, which uses the hardware video decoder built into Apple silicon. It is the same path QuickTime uses to play a file, so the cost is the cost of watching a video, not the cost of running a renderer.

For a mostly-static clip, that cost is close to nothing.

Scene wallpapers

A Wallpaper Engine scene is geometry, layers, particles and an animation script. PaperFlow evaluates it in Rust and draws it through Metal, on a single thread that owns the renderer.

The important part is that the engine does not draw frames it does not need. When a scene stops changing, the renderer sleeps. A scene with slow drifting particles costs far less than one that repaints the whole screen sixty times a second, and the difference is visible in the battery.

The controls that matter

Four settings cover most of the cost. A frame rate cap limits how often the scene redraws. Render scale draws the scene at a lower resolution and lets the display scale it up. Skipping repeated frames avoids drawing identical output. Pause on battery stops rendering entirely when the machine is unplugged.

A still, covered or paused wallpaper uses no rendering time at all, which is the answer behind all four: the cheapest frame is the one never drawn.

Which to pick

If you mostly work on battery and want something behind your windows, a video clip is the safer default. If you want a Wallpaper Engine scene, start with a capped frame rate and see whether you can tell the difference; on most scenes you cannot.