10 ms·

AMD Laptops finally reach the 4k screen barrier

117 points by basilgohar 5y ago

basilgohar 5y ago
This was really big news for me, so I really put a lot into documenting this important milestone and why I felt it was important. Also, it was my first time including an audio version, so feel free to load the page and listen rather than read. Just forgive the "first time-ed-ness" and my awkward mistakes. I did so many retakes and still so many glitches made it into the final audio recording.
glogla 5y ago
How is Linux support on those? And how is Linux support on 4k/HiDPI in general? I'm thinking of replacing aging Macbook Pro and those look pretty good.
- oofabz 5y ago
  Linux support for HiDPI is not great. GTK3 apps are scaled appropriately, but GTK2 apps are not, and there are still quite a few of those, like GIMP. Such apps are displayed ridiculously tiny on a 4k display with unreadably small text. I've heard that if you use Wayland, these older apps get pixel scaled up, but most Linux distros have spotty support for Wayland, so getting it running can be labor intensive.
  - summm 5y ago
    Unfortunately fractional scaling in wayland is broken to the point where even X works better: For videos in 1.5x scale, the player renders it at 2x and wayland scales it down to 1.5x, costing performance and causing artifacts. In X the video player just renders directly.
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  HiDPI on Linux is certainly not as good as MacOS (from what I've heard) or Windows but it can be decent. If you are on Wayland than display scaling both integer and fractional works pretty well. Scaling older X11/Xwayland applications can be a bit of a pain so sometimes those windows look blurry. 4K itself without any scaling works perfectly fine so I typically try to get laptops and monitors with a DPI between 100 and 140 so that I don't have to worry about scaling. Higher resolutions on smaller screens i.e laptops also use more power anyway.
  - basilgohar 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I run my 4k monitor at home at 1:1 so I don't use (and don't need) scaling, but nice to hear someone else had some experience with it. I always worry about the lag on desktop features with Linux, but I've generally not had problems in recent years with Fedora, for example.
  - saghm 5y ago
    I currently use a 4K monitor and a 2K monitor side by side for my work with 1.5x scaling on the 4K monitor, so things are the same size on both. Gnome only allowed integer scaling by default, but IIRC I enabled fractional scaling with a dconf setting that I found through googling. I don't have any issues with this setup, although obviously things look more clear on the 4K monitor, so some people might not like the disparity.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    On my 2013 Google Chromebook Pixel (running real Linux) I set Xft.dpi: 240 in my .Xresources file, matching the screen resolution. Seems to work well. I’m not sure what “scaling” is. Is that it? I wouldn’t want to use a 140 dpi screen, unless it were a big one mounted 6 feet or so away.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  ThinkPads overall tend to have great Linux support. Being AMD-only tends to improve that. The wireless networking drivers and sometimes features like brightness adjustment and Fn-based functionality are where there tends to be issues on early release but they are usually addressed quickly as adoption increases and more kernel devs look into reported issues. I'd love to buy some of these and do full-on reviews but the funding isn't there yet. AMDNow! currently makes me exactly zero dollars.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ccouzens 5y ago
  I use fedora gnome desktop and although it could be better, I'm happy with the scaling. The native apps like the terminal and Firefox scale perfectly. When in-between screens one screen may show the window very zoomed in, but when totally on one screen it will show correctly. Apps which still use x11 (Chrome, Steam, vscode, anything electron) show at the scale factor of the primary monitor. They're perfectly fine if you only use one monitor. When I have multiple monitors I make sure the x11 windows are on my externals (as they're the same scaling factor and one of them is my primary).
- robocat 5y ago
  I’ve had a 4K 15” Dell for a couple of years, and the Linux support for 4K has been very sucky with Ubuntu. There are lots of corner cases, and every now and then you run into a program that just won’t scale and the text is teensy weensy, and there is no usable workaround. I wished I had chosen the 1080p matt screen (or maybe 1440p 15” if that were an option on the XPS). Apart from that I have been pretty impressed with the Dell with Linux drivers - for example still getting necessary firmware updates via Ubuntu.
IntelMiner 5y ago
I'm surprised at the authors reverence for the Lenovo T14. I purchased one in September of last year and returned it in less than a month! While it was quite performant, the screen shipped with it was unusably color inaccuarate. Reviews online stating that it had a color accuracy of just 37% NTSC. In addition to having horrible color accuracy in general usage (tomatoes would look like oranges for instance) using something like "F.Lux" or "Windows Nightlight" would cause this level of color-inaccuracy to appear Windows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgjqeDF9c50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgjqeDF9c50 Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhLBx4mmPrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhLBx4mmPrM Microsoft's own demo of the technology shows what it "should" look like on a more proper display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QCRDn8-qLo#t=1m58s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QCRDn8-qLo#t=1m58s
- basilgohar 5y ago
  Very glad to hear your insight. I have not purchased one myself yet for lack of a detailed review of most of these. I wouldn't say I "revere" there, rather, I am just glad the options exist as all. I am hopeful for a network effect. Historically, however, the T series of ThinkPads have been excellent. My wife used to have one and many others did as well, and its legacy extended into the Lenovo era. Edit: I was specifically talking about the AMD T14s, specifically, so not sure if that's germane to your issue.
  - rincebrain 5y ago
    For quick reference on my AMD T14 with the 500nit display: https://www.dropbox.com/s/knsjnbw6875buwo/PXL_20211018_171940326.mp4?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/knsjnbw6875buwo/PXL_20211018_17194... (I do not have similar complaints about the color accuracy, personally, but I'm not especially sensitive to them.)
    - basilgohar 5y ago
      I will take your word for it, but I think captured video of screens' performance is probably not going to relay what you want to show in the best light (pun slightly intended). As I said elsewhere, I don't doubt the issues folks are having, and I hope more people raise it. It's important they are known and the OEMs address them. The comment has definitely sparked good discussion in the thread so far. I may cover that in future articles, too.
tomtheelder 5y ago
4k on laptops is sort of an anti-feature for me, personally. It doesn't really improve my experience much, and often costs a lot of battery life.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  You're not wrong. I would have preferred having the option of 2.5k instead of going all the way to 4k, but 4k is something I would choose to make use of with scaling for a clearer, crisper view of text when coding. I like working up close with my screen and, so far, thankfully, I have excellent near vision, so the appeal is there for me.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    There's a Yoga 7 Pro (iirc) with Ryzen and 2.5K OLED. I recently bought one for my mother-in-law, and after setting it up I can say it's a nice machine. Not a ThinkPad keyboard, but not awful by any means and quite decent build quality overall. Didn't load it with compute, though.
    - basilgohar 5y ago
      If this is available in the US, then I have not been able to find it. I've seen it listed on other countries' respective Lenovo pages or stores outside of the US.
      - sho_hn 5y ago
        This was indeed in South Korea.
- petepete 5y ago
  I bought a 4k ThinkPad X1 Carbon in 2019 and I love it, but in retrospect I totally should've bought the 1440p model. On a 14" screen you just don't appreciate the resolution.
  - 5y ago
StillBored 5y ago
The P14 has reasonable ram configurations from what I can tell. Its insane to think that 16G max on a 16 thread processor is enough for any serious workloads that scale with core count (aka a lot of them) as is provided with the T14. But I still don't get why lenovo still provides _soldered_ ram at all on the T/P series machines, I've been repeatedly gimped by that with my work provided machines (besides the inability to match timings when the socket has 2x the capacity installed/etc). But what I really want to know is where the full bios manual is, so that I can see if its possible to enable S3 standby. My use case for a laptop generally involves putting it in my bag overnight/etc and I expect the battery to basically be where I left it over the weekend/etc. I've yet to have a "modern standby" machine that can pull that off without hibernating the machine. Frequently even with hibernation it will wake repeatedly and drain the battery anyway. Toss in the fact that i've not had good luck with AMD machines power savings and that makes it doubly important that S3 works. The lack of a pre-installed linux option doesn't provide much confidence. Acer and some of the smaller vendors seem to be the only ones providing a full suite of BIOS options on their machines (they also have two dimm slots). The problem is that their machines are plasticy and have crummy form factors.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  This is why the high resolution screen options were so important. The extra features are almost always available on the smaller OEMs, such a Asus, Acer, MSI, etc., but rarely from the tier-1 vendors (if that is the appropriate term). Hopefully Lenovo doing this will encourage all the rest of the vendors to start making more sensible design changes as well. That's also the main motivation for me to call this out in such a detailed article – people should have all the choices available to them and not have them artificially directed to "Intel -> quality, AMD -> value/compromise".
- Brave-Steak 5y ago
  I've given up. I disable hibernation and I shutdown my laptop whenever I used to put it to sleep. It's bizarre that standby/hibernation no longer works reliably.
- dataflow 5y ago
  > I still don't get why lenovo still provides _soldered_ ram at all on the T/P series machines Cynical take: so you buy it, then realize it's soldered, then buy another computer? > But what I really want to know is where the full bios manual is, so that I can see if its possible to enable S3 standby. Some Lenovo laptops that come with Windows have a "Sleep State" option that you can switch from "Windows 10" to "Linux", which I think is what disables Modern Standby? I've seen C3 be enabled by one of the options on a recent Lenovo, I think it was probably that setting.
artfulhippo 5y ago
On the day that Apple takes their next step forward, this announcement is effusive over a 2560x1600 screen? Am I reading this right?
- basilgohar 5y ago
  They have never been available for AMD laptops before this and there are also, for the first time, 4k screens available on AMD laptops. The title really does hit all the important points I was trying to make, I believe. 2560x1600 is on the smallest of the 3 laptops featured in the article.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jikbd 5y ago
  It’s not fair to compare MacBooks to Windows laptops.
- oblak 5y ago
  Sure but Lenovo has been offering some AMD models with 90Hz 2880x1800 panels for some time now
xvilka 5y ago
For now the biggest problem with modern laptops is the small amount of RAM - most limited by 16Gb. In the age of Docker, virtual machines, Electron applications and heavy Web applications this amount is quickly insufficient.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  All these laptops I mentioned in the article can go up to 32GB, and two of them up to 48GB (albeit with unbalanced SODIMMs).
shmerl 5y ago
T14 (AMD Gen 2 with Zen 3) has a higher res config too. But how useful is such resolution on 14" laptop? Can you see a big difference? And I'd imagine it comes at the shorter battery life price as well.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  Many folks have commented on both sides – lots of folks think it's overkill and lots of other folks that have actually used those screens like it as it provides an overall higher quality display and viewing experience for sharpness and crispness of anti-aliased text and more. If you do not have good near-sighted vision, it's understandable if the feature is not that appealing to you.
  - shmerl 5y ago
    I see. I found it more surprising that there was no 2.5K option in between which could offer good balance between improved quality and not draining the battery too much.
post_break 5y ago
It's lenovo so is there still a display lottery for such display? 50/50 chance to get one that is garbage?
- basilgohar 5y ago
  It would be nice if this were accurately tracked somewhere so it can be called out and Lenovo being shamed for offering. If you have references to where this is logged, it'd be great. I've not heard of such a problem independently, but I'm interested in knowing more about that.
oblak 5y ago
Problem is, AMD powered laptops are somewhat hard to find. Lenovo has some real nice lightweight models with 120 Hz IPS screens but they only come with 16GB soldered RAM and 512GB SSD. And they are hard to find. Like real hard. Lightweight machines with 5800u/5850u and/or 5900hx are almost like unicorn like.
babypuncher 5y ago
By my math, a 4k laptop screen needs to be 20" diagonally before the pixel density drops to a perceptible level. Any smaller than that and the pixel density is so great that I don't think you are getting any improvement to clarity at a typical laptop viewing distance. 20" laptops are a pretty rare occurrence today, even in the desktop replacement space. Most laptops I see with 4k screens are 13" to 17". So my question is, why waste GPU cycles (and by extension, battery) driving all these extra pixels?
cjblomqvist 5y ago
Whatabout laptops like the Asus rog flow 13? It's been 4K and possible to buy for half a year at least? Am I missing something?
- basilgohar 5y ago
  One of the key points I was making was that pure AMD laptops have not had the high-end features afforded to those with either Intel or nVidia hardware. These Lenovo ThinkPads use AMD both for mainline CPU as well as GPU purposes (i.e., it's an APU that serves both functions). Laptops with only AMD for CPU and graphics acceleration have been notably absent from the 4k club until just now. That was the crux of the entire article.
ldng 5y ago
Trusted Lenovo with the A485 to have a good Ryzen laptop. Never again. Thinkpad is really loosing its edge.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  That's interesting. My wife has the same but she loves it. Maybe there are different use cases. She runs Fedora on it, for what it's worth, and never complains to me about the hardware itself.
  - ldng 5y ago
    Debian here. Runs very hot, loses key, usb does not always recognize devices, WiFi driver hold-up boot sequence for 2m, all in all a rushed and bad design that is not aging well in my case.
ece 5y ago
I've been using "Virtual Super Resolution", and it works well for at least watching Youtube videos. OLED for work isn't really a thing yet unless you're loaded, but that's what I'll be waiting for in more affordable laptops, more than 4k.
sireat 5y ago
Good news as 4k has been long time coming to AMD. However there is a bit of a problem when configuring 4k screen and 5850U on P14 on lenovo site: *Ships in 4+ months* Supply issues considered that is just horrible for a tier 1 manufacturer. PS There were no 4k ready to ship preconfigured options at the time I checked.
mikewarot 5y ago
Once you get older, you want less resolution, not more, because the pixels get too small. I've got a laptop with a native resolution of 1920x1080, which makes everything too small to see (blame Windows for this), but works just find for my secondary monitor which is twice the size, 4 times the area. I've currently got it set at 1280x720, which is a reasonable size when you drag things between monitors, or use it without the big screen. I definitely couldn't read anything with a font that fits more than about 30 lines of text on the screen. Enjoy those small texts, and lots of them, while you can.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Shouldn't use resolutions which needs to be scaled by the panel and/or driver because it makes things fuzzy because of interpolation. Exception would be if the resolution could be upscaled by exactly two in both directions. If that isn't possible, varying the default font sizes seems more useful. Another avenue to test would be small amounts of Cannabis, since that tends to lessen your inner eyeball pressure, and thus changes your sight. For me it seems to be the other way around. The older I get, the easier it is to read small things, if, and only if they are in far enough distance. So more distance from screen is better. Was just over an arms length, now I need more.
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    I would vary the font size, but then stuff on the bigger monitor would be too big. Windows really doesn't handle the idea of multiple size monitors well.
- tehnub 5y ago
  Well if you go high-enough resolution, then you can scale the display and it will be big enough to read, but also much sharper. You want integer scaling though, otherwise you get unclean lines, weird "rounding" errors, etc. On my 2880x1800 macbook, 2x scaling gets me 1440x900 apparent resolution, perfectly sharp and very readable. If you've got a 4K screen, you can do 2x scaling to get 1080. If you've got 8K… well then I suppose you can do 3x scaling to get 1440p. Now I'd like to see that.

117 points by basilgohar 5y ago

This was really big news for me, so I really put a lot into documenting this important milestone and why I felt it was important. Also, it was my first time including an audio version, so feel free to load the page and listen rather than read. Just forgive the "first time-ed-ness" and my awkward mistakes. I did so many retakes and still so many glitches made it into the final audio recording.

glogla 5y ago

How is Linux support on those? And how is Linux support on 4k/HiDPI in general? I'm thinking of replacing aging Macbook Pro and those look pretty good.

oofabz 5y ago
Linux support for HiDPI is not great. GTK3 apps are scaled appropriately, but GTK2 apps are not, and there are still quite a few of those, like GIMP. Such apps are displayed ridiculously tiny on a 4k display with unreadably small text. I've heard that if you use Wayland, these older apps get pixel scaled up, but most Linux distros have spotty support for Wayland, so getting it running can be labor intensive.
- summm 5y ago
  Unfortunately fractional scaling in wayland is broken to the point where even X works better: For videos in 1.5x scale, the player renders it at 2x and wayland scales it down to 1.5x, costing performance and causing artifacts. In X the video player just renders directly.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
HiDPI on Linux is certainly not as good as MacOS (from what I've heard) or Windows but it can be decent. If you are on Wayland than display scaling both integer and fractional works pretty well. Scaling older X11/Xwayland applications can be a bit of a pain so sometimes those windows look blurry. 4K itself without any scaling works perfectly fine so I typically try to get laptops and monitors with a DPI between 100 and 140 so that I don't have to worry about scaling. Higher resolutions on smaller screens i.e laptops also use more power anyway.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I run my 4k monitor at home at 1:1 so I don't use (and don't need) scaling, but nice to hear someone else had some experience with it. I always worry about the lag on desktop features with Linux, but I've generally not had problems in recent years with Fedora, for example.
- saghm 5y ago
  I currently use a 4K monitor and a 2K monitor side by side for my work with 1.5x scaling on the 4K monitor, so things are the same size on both. Gnome only allowed integer scaling by default, but IIRC I enabled fractional scaling with a dconf setting that I found through googling. I don't have any issues with this setup, although obviously things look more clear on the 4K monitor, so some people might not like the disparity.
- leephillips 5y ago
  On my 2013 Google Chromebook Pixel (running real Linux) I set Xft.dpi: 240 in my .Xresources file, matching the screen resolution. Seems to work well. I’m not sure what “scaling” is. Is that it? I wouldn’t want to use a 140 dpi screen, unless it were a big one mounted 6 feet or so away.
basilgohar 5y ago
ThinkPads overall tend to have great Linux support. Being AMD-only tends to improve that. The wireless networking drivers and sometimes features like brightness adjustment and Fn-based functionality are where there tends to be issues on early release but they are usually addressed quickly as adoption increases and more kernel devs look into reported issues. I'd love to buy some of these and do full-on reviews but the funding isn't there yet. AMDNow! currently makes me exactly zero dollars.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ccouzens 5y ago
I use fedora gnome desktop and although it could be better, I'm happy with the scaling. The native apps like the terminal and Firefox scale perfectly. When in-between screens one screen may show the window very zoomed in, but when totally on one screen it will show correctly. Apps which still use x11 (Chrome, Steam, vscode, anything electron) show at the scale factor of the primary monitor. They're perfectly fine if you only use one monitor. When I have multiple monitors I make sure the x11 windows are on my externals (as they're the same scaling factor and one of them is my primary).
robocat 5y ago
I’ve had a 4K 15” Dell for a couple of years, and the Linux support for 4K has been very sucky with Ubuntu. There are lots of corner cases, and every now and then you run into a program that just won’t scale and the text is teensy weensy, and there is no usable workaround. I wished I had chosen the 1080p matt screen (or maybe 1440p 15” if that were an option on the XPS). Apart from that I have been pretty impressed with the Dell with Linux drivers - for example still getting necessary firmware updates via Ubuntu.

IntelMiner 5y ago

I'm surprised at the authors reverence for the Lenovo T14. I purchased one in September of last year and returned it in less than a month! While it was quite performant, the screen shipped with it was unusably color inaccuarate. Reviews online stating that it had a color accuracy of just 37% NTSC. In addition to having horrible color accuracy in general usage (tomatoes would look like oranges for instance) using something like "F.Lux" or "Windows Nightlight" would cause this level of color-inaccuracy to appear Windows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgjqeDF9c50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgjqeDF9c50 Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhLBx4mmPrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhLBx4mmPrM Microsoft's own demo of the technology shows what it "should" look like on a more proper display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QCRDn8-qLo#t=1m58s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QCRDn8-qLo#t=1m58s

basilgohar 5y ago
Very glad to hear your insight. I have not purchased one myself yet for lack of a detailed review of most of these. I wouldn't say I "revere" there, rather, I am just glad the options exist as all. I am hopeful for a network effect. Historically, however, the T series of ThinkPads have been excellent. My wife used to have one and many others did as well, and its legacy extended into the Lenovo era. Edit: I was specifically talking about the AMD T14s, specifically, so not sure if that's germane to your issue.
- rincebrain 5y ago
  For quick reference on my AMD T14 with the 500nit display: https://www.dropbox.com/s/knsjnbw6875buwo/PXL_20211018_171940326.mp4?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/knsjnbw6875buwo/PXL_20211018_17194... (I do not have similar complaints about the color accuracy, personally, but I'm not especially sensitive to them.)
  - basilgohar 5y ago
    I will take your word for it, but I think captured video of screens' performance is probably not going to relay what you want to show in the best light (pun slightly intended). As I said elsewhere, I don't doubt the issues folks are having, and I hope more people raise it. It's important they are known and the OEMs address them. The comment has definitely sparked good discussion in the thread so far. I may cover that in future articles, too.

tomtheelder 5y ago

4k on laptops is sort of an anti-feature for me, personally. It doesn't really improve my experience much, and often costs a lot of battery life.

basilgohar 5y ago
You're not wrong. I would have preferred having the option of 2.5k instead of going all the way to 4k, but 4k is something I would choose to make use of with scaling for a clearer, crisper view of text when coding. I like working up close with my screen and, so far, thankfully, I have excellent near vision, so the appeal is there for me.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  There's a Yoga 7 Pro (iirc) with Ryzen and 2.5K OLED. I recently bought one for my mother-in-law, and after setting it up I can say it's a nice machine. Not a ThinkPad keyboard, but not awful by any means and quite decent build quality overall. Didn't load it with compute, though.
  - basilgohar 5y ago
    If this is available in the US, then I have not been able to find it. I've seen it listed on other countries' respective Lenovo pages or stores outside of the US.
    - sho_hn 5y ago
      This was indeed in South Korea.
petepete 5y ago
I bought a 4k ThinkPad X1 Carbon in 2019 and I love it, but in retrospect I totally should've bought the 1440p model. On a 14" screen you just don't appreciate the resolution.
- 5y ago

StillBored 5y ago

The P14 has reasonable ram configurations from what I can tell. Its insane to think that 16G max on a 16 thread processor is enough for any serious workloads that scale with core count (aka a lot of them) as is provided with the T14. But I still don't get why lenovo still provides _soldered_ ram at all on the T/P series machines, I've been repeatedly gimped by that with my work provided machines (besides the inability to match timings when the socket has 2x the capacity installed/etc). But what I really want to know is where the full bios manual is, so that I can see if its possible to enable S3 standby. My use case for a laptop generally involves putting it in my bag overnight/etc and I expect the battery to basically be where I left it over the weekend/etc. I've yet to have a "modern standby" machine that can pull that off without hibernating the machine. Frequently even with hibernation it will wake repeatedly and drain the battery anyway. Toss in the fact that i've not had good luck with AMD machines power savings and that makes it doubly important that S3 works. The lack of a pre-installed linux option doesn't provide much confidence. Acer and some of the smaller vendors seem to be the only ones providing a full suite of BIOS options on their machines (they also have two dimm slots). The problem is that their machines are plasticy and have crummy form factors.

basilgohar 5y ago
This is why the high resolution screen options were so important. The extra features are almost always available on the smaller OEMs, such a Asus, Acer, MSI, etc., but rarely from the tier-1 vendors (if that is the appropriate term). Hopefully Lenovo doing this will encourage all the rest of the vendors to start making more sensible design changes as well. That's also the main motivation for me to call this out in such a detailed article – people should have all the choices available to them and not have them artificially directed to "Intel -> quality, AMD -> value/compromise".
Brave-Steak 5y ago
I've given up. I disable hibernation and I shutdown my laptop whenever I used to put it to sleep. It's bizarre that standby/hibernation no longer works reliably.
dataflow 5y ago
> I still don't get why lenovo still provides _soldered_ ram at all on the T/P series machines Cynical take: so you buy it, then realize it's soldered, then buy another computer? > But what I really want to know is where the full bios manual is, so that I can see if its possible to enable S3 standby. Some Lenovo laptops that come with Windows have a "Sleep State" option that you can switch from "Windows 10" to "Linux", which I think is what disables Modern Standby? I've seen C3 be enabled by one of the options on a recent Lenovo, I think it was probably that setting.

artfulhippo 5y ago

On the day that Apple takes their next step forward, this announcement is effusive over a 2560x1600 screen? Am I reading this right?

basilgohar 5y ago
They have never been available for AMD laptops before this and there are also, for the first time, 4k screens available on AMD laptops. The title really does hit all the important points I was trying to make, I believe. 2560x1600 is on the smallest of the 3 laptops featured in the article.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jikbd 5y ago
It’s not fair to compare MacBooks to Windows laptops.
oblak 5y ago
Sure but Lenovo has been offering some AMD models with 90Hz 2880x1800 panels for some time now

xvilka 5y ago

For now the biggest problem with modern laptops is the small amount of RAM - most limited by 16Gb. In the age of Docker, virtual machines, Electron applications and heavy Web applications this amount is quickly insufficient.

basilgohar 5y ago
All these laptops I mentioned in the article can go up to 32GB, and two of them up to 48GB (albeit with unbalanced SODIMMs).

shmerl 5y ago

T14 (AMD Gen 2 with Zen 3) has a higher res config too. But how useful is such resolution on 14" laptop? Can you see a big difference? And I'd imagine it comes at the shorter battery life price as well.

basilgohar 5y ago
Many folks have commented on both sides – lots of folks think it's overkill and lots of other folks that have actually used those screens like it as it provides an overall higher quality display and viewing experience for sharpness and crispness of anti-aliased text and more. If you do not have good near-sighted vision, it's understandable if the feature is not that appealing to you.
- shmerl 5y ago
  I see. I found it more surprising that there was no 2.5K option in between which could offer good balance between improved quality and not draining the battery too much.

post_break 5y ago

It's lenovo so is there still a display lottery for such display? 50/50 chance to get one that is garbage?

basilgohar 5y ago
It would be nice if this were accurately tracked somewhere so it can be called out and Lenovo being shamed for offering. If you have references to where this is logged, it'd be great. I've not heard of such a problem independently, but I'm interested in knowing more about that.

oblak 5y ago

Problem is, AMD powered laptops are somewhat hard to find. Lenovo has some real nice lightweight models with 120 Hz IPS screens but they only come with 16GB soldered RAM and 512GB SSD. And they are hard to find. Like real hard. Lightweight machines with 5800u/5850u and/or 5900hx are almost like unicorn like.

babypuncher 5y ago

By my math, a 4k laptop screen needs to be 20" diagonally before the pixel density drops to a perceptible level. Any smaller than that and the pixel density is so great that I don't think you are getting any improvement to clarity at a typical laptop viewing distance. 20" laptops are a pretty rare occurrence today, even in the desktop replacement space. Most laptops I see with 4k screens are 13" to 17". So my question is, why waste GPU cycles (and by extension, battery) driving all these extra pixels?

cjblomqvist 5y ago

Whatabout laptops like the Asus rog flow 13? It's been 4K and possible to buy for half a year at least? Am I missing something?

basilgohar 5y ago
One of the key points I was making was that pure AMD laptops have not had the high-end features afforded to those with either Intel or nVidia hardware. These Lenovo ThinkPads use AMD both for mainline CPU as well as GPU purposes (i.e., it's an APU that serves both functions). Laptops with only AMD for CPU and graphics acceleration have been notably absent from the 4k club until just now. That was the crux of the entire article.

ldng 5y ago

Trusted Lenovo with the A485 to have a good Ryzen laptop. Never again. Thinkpad is really loosing its edge.

basilgohar 5y ago
That's interesting. My wife has the same but she loves it. Maybe there are different use cases. She runs Fedora on it, for what it's worth, and never complains to me about the hardware itself.
- ldng 5y ago
  Debian here. Runs very hot, loses key, usb does not always recognize devices, WiFi driver hold-up boot sequence for 2m, all in all a rushed and bad design that is not aging well in my case.

ece 5y ago

I've been using "Virtual Super Resolution", and it works well for at least watching Youtube videos. OLED for work isn't really a thing yet unless you're loaded, but that's what I'll be waiting for in more affordable laptops, more than 4k.

sireat 5y ago

Good news as 4k has been long time coming to AMD. However there is a bit of a problem when configuring 4k screen and 5850U on P14 on lenovo site: *Ships in 4+ months* Supply issues considered that is just horrible for a tier 1 manufacturer. PS There were no 4k ready to ship preconfigured options at the time I checked.

mikewarot 5y ago

Once you get older, you want less resolution, not more, because the pixels get too small. I've got a laptop with a native resolution of 1920x1080, which makes everything too small to see (blame Windows for this), but works just find for my secondary monitor which is twice the size, 4 times the area. I've currently got it set at 1280x720, which is a reasonable size when you drag things between monitors, or use it without the big screen. I definitely couldn't read anything with a font that fits more than about 30 lines of text on the screen. Enjoy those small texts, and lots of them, while you can.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Shouldn't use resolutions which needs to be scaled by the panel and/or driver because it makes things fuzzy because of interpolation. Exception would be if the resolution could be upscaled by exactly two in both directions. If that isn't possible, varying the default font sizes seems more useful. Another avenue to test would be small amounts of Cannabis, since that tends to lessen your inner eyeball pressure, and thus changes your sight. For me it seems to be the other way around. The older I get, the easier it is to read small things, if, and only if they are in far enough distance. So more distance from screen is better. Was just over an arms length, now I need more.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  I would vary the font size, but then stuff on the bigger monitor would be too big. Windows really doesn't handle the idea of multiple size monitors well.
tehnub 5y ago
Well if you go high-enough resolution, then you can scale the display and it will be big enough to read, but also much sharper. You want integer scaling though, otherwise you get unclean lines, weird "rounding" errors, etc. On my 2880x1800 macbook, 2x scaling gets me 1440x900 apparent resolution, perfectly sharp and very readable. If you've got a 4K screen, you can do 2x scaling to get 1080. If you've got 8K… well then I suppose you can do 3x scaling to get 1440p. Now I'd like to see that.