A display device is operated by using several iterations of a scan phase followed by a global drive phase. In the scan phase, the state of each pixel in the display device is set to either “enabled” or “disabled”, during which time a global drive generator is inactive. Then, in the global drive phase, a global drive signal is sent to the display device. Only the subset of enabled pixels is affected by the global drive signal, which causes the enabled pixels to perform a transition to a desired display state. The sequence of the scan phase followed by the global drive phase is then repeated up to the number of unique transitions required to update the display device.