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
    2019-03-16T04:49:26+00:00

    I've found that turning off timeline reduces the issue. Going into settings, privacy, activity history and turning it off for all accounts made the experience much smoother, albeit still not perfect for a device with so much horsepower and such a price tag.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-04-09T20:26:01+00:00

    Turning off the transparency effect def helps a lot. I got a ThinkPad so I have the option to switch to dGPU only. Still, it would be nice if MS can downscale the animation resolution. Apple does well on this matter cuz it uses Iris Pro for the majority of its laptop lineups. Sadly that's not the case for Windows laptops. UHD 620 is just too weak to handle 4k.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-04-10T04:55:26+00:00

    Turning off the transparency effect def helps a lot. I got a ThinkPad so I have the option to switch to dGPU only. Still, it would be nice if MS can downscale the animation resolution. Apple does well on this matter cuz it uses Iris Pro for the majority of its laptop lineups. Sadly that's not the case for Windows laptops. UHD 620 is just too weak to handle 4k. 

    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

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  4. 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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