Power management of display controller

In general, in one aspect, a display controller has non-essential portions powered off for a portion of vertical blanking interval (VBI) periods to conserve power. The portion takes into account overhead for housekeeping functions and memory latency for receiving a fist packet of pixels for a frame to be decoded during a next active period. Gating circuitry may gate power to the non-essential portions starting at beginning of the VBI periods. A latency predictor may predict the portion of the VBI periods by predicting the memory latency for a next VBI period and subtracting the predicted memory latency from the VBI period. The memory latency for the next VBI period may be predicted by adding an average difference between successive actual memory latencies for a plurality of VBI periods to an actual memory latency for previous VBI period. A constant delay may also be subtracted from the VBI period.