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Ever since I got my Surface Book 2 (15 inch), Windows UI performance was quite sluggish. Windows framerate drops noticeably when opening Task View even with only one or two windows open, and switching desktop also experiences stutter.
I tried to diagnose the issue myself, by installing latest drivers for UHD 620 graphics from both Microsoft and Intel. I tried reinstalling / uninstalling drivers for GTX 1060. None of these worked, and I have reinstalled Windows several times but nothing has changed.
However, one "solution" to this problem was to decrease the screen resolution to 1620*1080 @ 100% scaling, which mitigated the issue significantly. The usage of UHD 620 graphics is much lower (shown under graph labelled "3D") with lower resolution and animation became much smoother. Upon research I discovered that this issue is not specific to my device. Many other laptops with high resolution displays were experiencing the same problem.
Here are some links to thread discussing seemingly similar issue:
4k laptop lag in Windows 10 UI animations
Laggy animations and effects at 4K resolution (running Windows 10)
Is it that the Integrated Graphics Card in these laptops are not powerful enough to drive such a high resolution display? If so, the solution is not to lower the resolution as I did - that is just a poor excuse. Even my MacBook Pro Retina from 2012 performs better on MacOS than my Surface Book 2 does on Windows.
OR it is very likely that Windows 10 optimization on high-resolution laptops is just poor. It is ridiculous that such a high-end laptop experiences lag within its native OS only with few windows open; if Apple can do well with their animation on MacOS, there is no reason for Microsoft not to be able to do it.
Please look into this issue and fix it, Microsoft.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I have the same issue. When i first purchased my Surface Book 2 a couple of months ago, i was able to play Fortnite on the Medium to Highest setting without any lag. I now can only play on the lowest setting and lucky to get over 20-30 FPS. Quite frustrating, especially when I spoke to Microsoft and the Surface Book 2 was recommended to me as the best laptop that would provide very good gaming experience.
thanks for your reply
Sadly not yet; I have contacted Microsoft support three times for this, but the Surface support team was not able to help me. It is definitely an issue with Windows itself where Microsoft did not properly optimize Windows. (My MacBook Pro with Intel HD 4000 graphics run MacOS more smoothly than SB2 does)
For now, I recommend you to use Custom Resolution Utility to reduce the resolution to 2430*1620 @ 150% scaling. (2250*1500 for 13.5 inch). This does help quite a bit while keeping the screen look moderately nice. Still, we should be contacting Microsoft engineers directly for this issue.
did you find the solution? I'm facing same problem
Could you give me a few hours let me see if I can get some folks to look into this?
Okay, thanks! Hopefully this gets fixed in RS5 because I love everything else about this laptop :)
