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
    2018-05-29T14:27:10+00:00

    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.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-05-29T14:21:47+00:00

    did you find the solution? I'm facing same problem

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-04-08T16:14:57+00:00

    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 :)

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-04-08T16:03:08+00:00

    Here is my submission regarding this issue posted two weeks ago:

    https://aka.ms/Etm6kl

    I also acknowledged this issue to /u/jenmsft:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/86m91g/announcing\_windows\_10\_insider\_preview\_build\_17128/dw66uts/

    Also, I have experienced this issue in Windows 10 version 1703 (the version Surface Book 2 shipped with) and in version 1709. I am also running version 1803 (build 17133.1) currently and nothing has improved yet. 

    Should I contact Microsoft engineers again?

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-04-08T15:58:30+00:00

    Probably optimizations for Windows 10 on the Surface Book 2 are just not there yet. The Surface Book 2 was released in June 2017 and its possible the engineering wasn't working with the team to get those full ready in time for release.

    I would recommend you upgrade to next weeks Windows 10 1803 to see if there any any improvement.

    In the mean time. I suggest you use the Feedback Hub to submit a bug report detailing your problem.

    Press Windows key + F

    This will open the Feedback hub

    Proceed to submit your report.

    Feedback:

    You can reach out to key folks on the Windows Engineering team through Twitter

    https://twitter.com/donasarkar

    https://twitter.com/brandonleblanc

    https://twitter.com/jenmsft

    https://twitter.com/northfacehiker

    Make sure you send short link to them. They are known to be very responsive and might be able to point it in the right direction.

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