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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

penny-arcade.com

21–30 of 256 posts

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#21
It’s very hard to take something like how the device “feels” to draw on and convert that into something engineers can use. I ended up describing it in terms of speaking. I said drawing on the Pro 2 was like having a conversation with someone. With the Surface Pro 3 I feel like I need to either whisper or yell to have the same conversation. I had to press very lightly or very hard, and it changes the way I draw. I was also able to show them some of the lag I was noticing. They could all see me draw a line and watch it pop in a split second later.

There is a reason why Wacom dominated its niche for so long, even in the face of inexpensive asian knock-offs. (1) They had this stuff right. (2) Hackers who are perceptive enough that they don't underestimate the difficulty of getting this stuff right are a very small minority.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#24
post #3

Great to see Microsoft listening to issues with the Surface and attempting to fix them. Hopefully they can polish it up into a machine that can be competitive in the market.

At the last startup I worked at, Microsoft sent designers and engineers that worked on Windows Server to better understand why we deployed on CentOS. They flew in from Redmond and spent a couple hours with us. We were forthright with them and they seemed to take the feedback to heart (differences in automation being the biggest solid need we could offer, since "running a Windows shop is just different" isn't really t…

They need to increase the fanout of systems engineering knowledge on the windows platform (outside of microsoft). For low level stuff its much easier finding information about linux than it is about any of the other OS'es (in my limited experience).

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#25

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious

It's the classic QA paradox. The typical hacker world view doesn't prioritize such feel issues enough. Even in today's UX focused world, stylus specific issues aren't widely understood. Combine the dynamics of the Asch conformity experiment, and it makes perfect sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnT2FcuZaYI

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#26
post #8

The one thing that nobody seems to appreciate when it comes to pushing forward towards retina displays is just how many more pixels, how much more memory, and how much slower everything is on the same hardware. Yet, anyone who has ever been a gamer knows that changing your resolution has a huge impact on your FPS. It is foolish to think that Microsoft can make the screen much higher resolution, have a similar chip, a…

As someone who is not a gamer, I am curious -- why is it not the GPU that is the most critical when talking about the FPS and refresh rate for things like pen input? Is the issue that the CPU is "in the loop"? Is this a matter of the built in graphics on the Haswell chips not being quite good enough for this application, or is it actually the CPU? I mostly wonder because I've found the improvements to the GPU in the…

I would suspect one or combination of the following issues:

1) The OS doesn't give the pen interrupt high enough priority

2) The bandwidth between the CPU and touch screen digitizer is too small

3) Too many background processes that cause CPU to be overwhelmed (not likely though)

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#27
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is not a gamer, I am curious -- why is it not the GPU that is the most critical when talking about the FPS and refresh rate for things like pen input? Is the issue that the CPU is "in the loop"? Is this a matter of the built in graphics on the Haswell chips not being quite good enough for this application, or is it actually the CPU? I mostly wonder because I've found the improvements to the GPU in the…

It's really a question of faster motherboards .

Don't these things use Intel GPUs that are on the CPU?

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really a question of faster motherboards .

Wait, really? What is the bottleneck on the motherboard?

The problem was traditionally the link between the northbridge (which connects connects the CPU and RAM) and the southbridge (handles peripheral connections like SATA, PCI, PCI-E, etc) components of the motherboard. Intel has now changed their architecture in the last 4 or 5 years to be a single Platform Controller Hub where the CPU provides the functionality previously found in the northbridge chip.

In this particular case, a "faster motherboard" might have helped with pushing updates to the GPU faster, though my guess is that graphics memory becomes the concern with double the resolution (which in turn needs to have updates pushed by the CPU, so it could help anyway)

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#29
post #18

OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development. Bold (and encouraging) move on their part if they didn't.

> OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development

Mike Krahulik has been a fan of Surface Pro from the beginning,[1] has been very vocal about what he likes and dislikes, and has a very large audience.[2] It seems likely they were counting on him blogging his experiences as soon as possible after his last Surface Pro post,[3] which had some fairly negative points that made using the new Surface Pro difficult (if not impossible) for him.

[1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surf...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Arcade

[3]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/05/23/surface-pro...

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#30
post #18

OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development. Bold (and encouraging) move on their part if they didn't.

> OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development Mike Krahulik has been a fan of Surface Pro from the beginning,[1] has been very vocal about what he likes and dislikes, and has a very large audience.[2] It seems likely they were counting on him blogging his experiences as soon as possible after his last Surface Pro post,[3] w…

Microsoft keeping Gabe happy with the surface line is probably one of their top 5 PR priorities for the devices. I am not surprised by this post in the least, but I am glad that Gabe is going to get something he can use for his work.
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