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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.
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.
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?..
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.
Same issue here. Have had my SB2 for a month and irritated with how janky the animations and multitasking are for such a high end product.
Any proper solutions?
It's extremely frustrating. I don't know if they will ever fix it... The animation is also terrible on my Surface Pro 6. What I found helpful was to turn off animations all together. To do this, open settings and type in 'animation' in the search box. Click on the option that says something like 'Show animations in Windows' and uncheck that box. I know its not ideal but at least it makes it much faster. Give it a shot and hopefully you can find it helpful.
