Surface Book 2 Task View Lag (and other high-resolution laptops included)

Anonymous
2018-04-08T15:54:29+00:00

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)

Windows 10 Animation lags

Lag with Surface book 2

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.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-05-23T03:29:31+00:00

    I have the exact same issues with my Surface Book 2. Upgrading to 1803, 1809 and now 1903 have not solved any of them.

    Task View is extremely laggy. Excel is extremely laggy. I am so sick and tired of this, it cost me so much money to buy this Surface Book 2 and I had wrongly assumed that since Microsoft built both the hardware and software that there'd be no issues.

    How can Microsoft not even acknowledge this issue? Literally everyone with a Surface Book or other Surface product has this issue. Absolutely unacceptable and looks like sheer incompetence.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-05-21T18:55:43+00:00

    Huge heads up!

    I've got the laggy UI (Surface Book 2, I7, GTX 1050) like everyone else but always wonder even I add a high resolution external display the lag disappears completely.

    And it appears I've found the culprit, but you can check for youself.

    It's all about UI scaling.

    Trying adjusting UI scaling from whatever it is now (200% on Surface Book 2) to 100% and boom = Fluent UI even in taskview! - Now try to go back, major difference right?..

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-05-13T18:19:20+00:00

    You know it's really a shame that this is still happening to all of you. I was looking into this and ran into this thread, this has been a problem since release? Like that isn't good at all. I did the reddit trick with defender as well as shrunk my start menu so it doesn't have to render all the tiles. Runs much better but a shame there isn't a better way around this.

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-04-10T20:06:22+00:00

    Thank you, turning off transparency has helped a lot. But I don't think the problem is with UHD 620, it is pretty powerful gpu. This is more optimization problem by Intel and/or Microsoft and I hope they will fix that in the future

    It is clearly an optimization issue. I have noticed that this only happens when modern style apps are open. Meaning, that you can open any Win32 app, Word, File Explorer, Chrome and timeline is as smooth as butter. Open any modern app, Mail/Calendar, Edge, Sticky Notes and timeline will start to slow down.

    In fact, all animations in Windows will start to slow down as soon as you open modern style apps. Seems they allocate GPU resources differently than Win32 apps.

    This was tested on a Surface Book 2 and a Surface Laptop running 1903 and the latest nVidia/Intel drivers.

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