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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 h

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, and not have serious performance problems in terms of responsiveness. I'm sure Microsoft can get a lot of this fixed and they will, but like the smartphone revolution, sometimes you have to wait for hardware to catch up with software or you have to write the software to take full advantage of the hardware.

LordIllidan 12y ago
Agreed, and it's not limited to Microsoft. The iPhone 4 and the iPad 3 both had 2x the resolution of their predecessors but barely managed to keep the same level of performance.
- TulliusCicero 12y ago
  Correction: 2x in each dimension, so actually 4x the total resolution.
- programminggeek 12y ago
  That's one reason Apple kept the iPad 2 around for so long. It still performs really well and for most users that makes a bigger difference than higher resolution.
neltnerb 12y ago
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 Haswell processors to be game changing. I can use Solidworks reasonably well on my core i5 laptop! The idea of doing that with integrated graphics on any other computer would have been laughable. Will a faster CPU really improve this (i7 vs i5)? Or is it a matter of getting a higher end GPU attached to the same CPU (i3 with more powerful integrated GPU)?
- rhizome 12y ago
  It's really a question of faster motherboards.
  - neltnerb 12y ago
    Wait, really? What is the bottleneck on the motherboard?
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      bus speed.
    - rhizome 12y ago
      It sits between the GPU and the display.
    - skyebook 12y ago
      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)
      - danudey 12y ago
        In modern Intel processors (especially in portable devices), the GPU is integrated on the CPU die, so pushing updates doesn't count (unless you count pulling data from main memory to provide to the GPU).
  - bratsche 12y ago
    Don't these things use Intel GPUs that are on the CPU?
al2o3cr 12y ago
"It is foolish to think that Microsoft can make the screen much higher resolution, have a similar chip, and not have serious performance problems in terms of responsiveness." Sure. It's not, however, foolish to wonder why they'd RELEASE a laggy device. Hoping that an already small market will shell out $1000+ for a device that might get a future SW update to work as well as the last model is ridiculous.

LordIllidan 12y ago

Agreed, and it's not limited to Microsoft. The iPhone 4 and the iPad 3 both had 2x the resolution of their predecessors but barely managed to keep the same level of performance.

TulliusCicero 12y ago
Correction: 2x in each dimension, so actually 4x the total resolution.
programminggeek 12y ago
That's one reason Apple kept the iPad 2 around for so long. It still performs really well and for most users that makes a bigger difference than higher resolution.

neltnerb 12y ago

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 Haswell processors to be game changing. I can use Solidworks reasonably well on my core i5 laptop! The idea of doing that with integrated graphics on any other computer would have been laughable. Will a faster CPU really improve this (i7 vs i5)? Or is it a matter of getting a higher end GPU attached to the same CPU (i3 with more powerful integrated GPU)?

rhizome 12y ago
It's really a question of faster motherboards.
- neltnerb 12y ago
  Wait, really? What is the bottleneck on the motherboard?
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    bus speed.
  - rhizome 12y ago
    It sits between the GPU and the display.
  - skyebook 12y ago
    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)
    - danudey 12y ago
      In modern Intel processors (especially in portable devices), the GPU is integrated on the CPU die, so pushing updates doesn't count (unless you count pulling data from main memory to provide to the GPU).
- bratsche 12y ago
  Don't these things use Intel GPUs that are on the CPU?

al2o3cr 12y ago

"It is foolish to think that Microsoft can make the screen much higher resolution, have a similar chip, and not have serious performance problems in terms of responsiveness." Sure. It's not, however, foolish to wonder why they'd RELEASE a laggy device. Hoping that an already small market will shell out $1000+ for a device that might get a future SW update to work as well as the last model is ridiculous.