Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

[Shifty Geezer]

It might well be the case MS have learned and improved. Their engineering is just unproven to me.

Incidentally, do you use auto-hide on the Task Bar? If so, do you get it where you can't pull it up and have to cheat it onto the screen (using notifications button in my case)? That's been a fault since day one and in years since release and with many updates, it's an unfixed bug. It might possibly be to do with using non-native screen resolution, but native is too small for older apps I have.

 

[PSman1700]

A touch on the GCN arch, i got myself a used 7950 OC edition. It does High settings at 60fps (Eternal), some tweaking and you can do High and some Ultra 60fps, 1080p basically all the time. My 670 does low and not even close to 60fps. I remember when getting the 670, it was actually competing with a 7970. It must be optimization besides the compute advantage, GCN has the advantage of being found in consoles also, where they optimize like nothing else, with kepler being not so compute friendly. I'm sure that, would there have been a kepler GPU in the consoles, things would have run better, devs would have optimized for that architecture more. But yea, GCN did age like fine wine.

Overall, i'm impressed, this actual gpu was bought in early 2012, it was basically what the 670 was in the kepler line. Back then, you could have gotten a 7870 and expect atleast PS4 base performance the rest of it's lifetime.
Tested RDR2 and some others, very good performance. Now going to see if i can lift this this thing to a 7970 with a bios mod. Good buy for a 20 dollar used gpu

Edit: damn, the 7970 is a beast of a GPU considering the release date (december 2011). With the 7950 already performing this well, the 7970 at a full 1TF more besides its other specs. They are harder to find used, but a 280 should be the same thing really.

 

[PSman1700]

Their engineering is just unproven to me.

You sure? The One X is a engineering marvel in terms of hardware design, runs very cool and queite, rather small form factor considering the hardware its housing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Everyone extolled the virtues of the SP4's great engineering too. I'm not expecting any problem with XBSX, but you can't really evaluate its engineering until it's been 5 years in action where you learn if mistakes have been made. Like PS3 even - everyone loved the engineering of that, and had pin-ups of the motherboard. Turned out to be flawed in a couple of a ways. Maybe come their next console, MS will have enough positive kudos with me that I'll assume anything their Surface engineering team works on will be wunderbar. At the moment though, reputation has to be founded on experience.

 

[PSman1700]

So, that's about two years left for the OneX to convince you

 

[iroboto]

Everyone extolled the virtues of the SP4's great engineering too. I'm not expecting any problem with XBSX, but you can't really evaluate its engineering until it's been 5 years in action where you learn if mistakes have been made. Like PS3 even - everyone loved the engineering of that, and had pin-ups of the motherboard. Turned out to be flawed in a couple of a ways. Maybe come their next console, MS will have enough positive kudos with me that I'll assume anything their Surface engineering team works on will be wunderbar. At the moment though, reputation has to be founded on experience.

Hmm. I’ll have to relay your concerns with surface. I don’t own one myself. But that’s concerning

 

[AzBat]

I'm not saying Shifty is not having problems with his Surface Pro 4, but from the vast numbers of products they produced & sold(12 different models since SP4 shipped) seems to hint that he is an exception. Shifty buy another Surface to make sure yours wasn't a statistical anomaly & then we can talk more about the Surface design team.

Tommy McClain

 

[AlNom]

I like the Surface Laptop 1 & 3 that I've used.

 

[PSman1700]

Ive personally never used them, but a family member has one, never had any problems there.

 

[techuse]

A touch on the GCN arch, i got myself a used 7950 OC edition. It does High settings at 60fps (Eternal), some tweaking and you can do High and some Ultra 60fps, 1080p basically all the time. My 670 does low and not even close to 60fps. I remember when getting the 670, it was actually competing with a 7970. It must be optimization besides the compute advantage, GCN has the advantage of being found in consoles also, where they optimize like nothing else, with kepler being not so compute friendly. I'm sure that, would there have been a kepler GPU in the consoles, things would have run better, devs would have optimized for that architecture more. But yea, GCN did age like fine wine.

Overall, i'm impressed, this actual gpu was bought in early 2012, it was basically what the 670 was in the kepler line. Back then, you could have gotten a 7870 and expect atleast PS4 base performance the rest of it's lifetime.
Tested RDR2 and some others, very good performance. Now going to see if i can lift this this thing to a 7970 with a bios mod. Good buy for a 20 dollar used gpu

Edit: damn, the 7970 is a beast of a GPU considering the release date (december 2011). With the 7950 already performing this well, the 7970 at a full 1TF more besides its other specs. They are harder to find used, but a 280 should be the same thing really.

Ya it really is impressive. I dont think it can be attributed only to console optimization that GCN has lasted this many years and outperformed 3 consecutive Nvidia architectures.

 

[PSman1700]

Yes, dunno what happened there in special with Eternal, consoles having GCN plays a role atleast. Any GCN product aged way better. A 7970 being able to play at Ultra/60fps/1080p thats just impressive.

 

[turkey]

Yes, dunno what happened there in special with Eternal, consoles having GCN plays a role atleast. Any GCN product aged way better. A 7970 being able to play at Ultra/60fps/1080p thats just impressive.

I mean it just does not compute.... Oh hang on...

 

[dobwal]

I'm not saying Shifty is not having problems with his Surface Pro 4, but from the vast numbers of products they produced & sold(12 different models since SP4 shipped) seems to hint that he is an exception. Shifty buy another Surface to make sure yours wasn't a statistical anomaly & then we can talk more about the Surface design team.

Tommy McClain

Better yet, steal one so he can put some respect on the first part of his name.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

It might well be the case MS have learned and improved. Their engineering is just unproven to me.

Incidentally, do you use auto-hide on the Task Bar? If so, do you get it where you can't pull it up and have to cheat it onto the screen (using notifications button in my case)? That's been a fault since day one and in years since release and with many updates, it's an unfixed bug. It might possibly be to do with using non-native screen resolution, but native is too small for older apps I have.

The screen on the 15" Surface Book 2 that I have is large enough that I haven't felt the need to hide the taskbar on it, so I haven't tried it long term. The only system I have where autohide taskbar is enabled is on my WHS 2011 (Vista based) machine, and it doesn't exhibit any problems there.

The hardware design for the SP4 itself was very good. But, that said, MS certainly didn't do a great job at supporting the hardware in Windows on launch which was surprising considering it was their hardware design on their OS. Additionally SP4 represents the point where they stopped using Wacom and switched to N-Trig. N-Trig was definitely not as good and first gen Surface Pens using it definitely had some problems. Gen2 pens improved not only the tech but the support for N-Trig (acquired by MS sometime after SP4) technology. IMO, Wacom is still better, but the Gen2 N-Trig based Surface Pens are significantly better than Gen1 pens as well as being much closer to Wacom.

So, yeah, Surface Pro 4 was a relatively volatile time to jump in. The hardware of the device itself was improved over SP3, but the pen technology and support got worse compared to SP3. And as you seem to be using the pen a lot, that will certainly color your experience of the device.

As a percentage of users, most SP4 users don't appear to use the pen which is likely why most have had a better experience. Because of the low percentage of SP users using the pen, MS later decided to make the pen an optional accessory instead of including it.

That's also likely why there is now a Surface Laptop in addition to the Surface Book and Surface Pro. Which now makes me wonder if the percentage of Surface Pro users using a pen is going up? IE - people that used to get an Surface Pro but not using the pen now buying a Surface Book or Surface Laptop instead.

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Incidentally, do you use auto-hide on the Task Bar? If so, do you get it where you can't pull it up and have to cheat it onto the screen (using notifications button in my case)? That's been a fault since day one and in years since release and with many updates, it's an unfixed bug. It might possibly be to do with using non-native screen resolution, but native is too small for older apps I have.

Apologies for O/T but the Windows desktop has a bugs that are decades old. The one that will not die that impacts us a lot at work is the way Windows gets confused when you have two screens with different attributes, particular combinations of physical size, resolution and pixel density, i.e. high DPI. At work you get the choice of a 13" MacBook Pro or 13" Dell XPS which is a solid machine with a lovely high DPI screen but plug that sucker into a large screen with a low DPI and Windows will frequently scale UI elements in the wrong way, so things are cartoonishly large or too small to see. It you drag the Windows back and forth between screens you can confuse it to scale it correctly. It seems ti impact Adobe Acrobat the most, which often has a ludicrously huge toolbar (like 1/4 the size of the scree) and a tiny, tiny render of the document.

The kludge fix is to run your laptop screen at a lower resolution and in my experience, the average user does not notice.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Apologies for O/T but the Windows desktop has a bugs that are decades old. The one that will not die that impacts us a lot at work is the way Windows gets confused when you have two screens with different attributes, particular combinations of physical size, resolution and pixel density, i.e. high DPI. At work you get the choice of a 13" MacBook Pro or 13" Dell XPS which is a solid machine with a lovely high DPI screen but plug that sucker into a large screen with a low DPI and Windows will frequently scale UI elements in the wrong way, so things are cartoonishly large or too small to see. It you drag the Windows back and forth between screens you can confuse it to scale it correctly. It seems ti impact Adobe Acrobat the most, which often has a ludicrously huge toolbar (like 1/4 the size of the scree) and a tiny, tiny render of the document.

The kludge fix is to run your laptop screen at a lower resolution and in my experience, the average user does not notice.

Holy shit, I just got a 27" 1440p monitor and when I drag windows over to my laptop screen they're enormous and I have to resize everything. I hate it.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Holy shit, I just got a 27" 1440p monitor and when I drag windows over to my laptop screen they're enormous and I have to resize everything. I hate it.

Microsoft did an official blog post on why this happens and why it's complicated to fix.

Not intending to turn this into a PC-vs-Mac post, the Mac side-steps issue by having a compositing window manager, i.e. every window is rendered into it's own display space then those windows are composited onto the various desktop screens - partially if if they're being dragged across multip displays. This arrangement abstraction make scaling across multiple displays rock solid.

I remember the first time I saw the macOS (then OSX) Mission Control where all the windows can shuffle to the edges of the screen, or get re-arranged so they're all visible - but scaled down so you can see them all - including video and games just running all scaled at 60hz. It's unimpressive now but back in 2004 it was absolute witchcraft. No idea what linux does, I never run it outside a VM.

 

[Arwin]

Holy shit, I just got a 27" 1440p monitor and when I drag windows over to my laptop screen they're enormous and I have to resize everything. I hate it.

There is a setting for that though.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

There is a setting for that though.

Massive issue for millions of people. "there's a setting for that". Doesn't mention the setting.

Are you striving for the troll of the year trophy?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PS5 deep dive. Discussion here though. Don't discuss in this thread as it's PS5 specific.