The surface pro 2 came out today (and the surface 2 as well, but that's less interesting).
I'm writing this on my 256gb model.
I just got home from work (it's 9:45pm here) and I need to do a few hours of prep for my class tomorrow morning, but I'm installing drivers and stuff so I can try ogre on it.
Damn nice little device, i'm very happy so far.
The Type 2 cover is pretty cool. Physical keyboard, actual moving and backlit keys, mouse trackpad, and only 5.4mm thick.
Ogre 2.0 first benchmark.
Rendering 62500 entities (cubes), all on screen at once.
My desktop (nvidia GTX680, hex core i7): 174fps
Surface Pro 2 (intel hd4400, dual core i5): 88fps
That's not bad for an intel gpu, just under half the speed of my gtx680. Not a great test, the cubes are bare untextured, but there's still 62500 of them at once!
The same test in ogre 1.9 is 29fps on the surface pro 2.
Nope. I avoided the previous one due to the battery life.
I went for the Surface Pro 2 because:
- wacom pen (it's even compatible with my galaxy note 2's pen)
- runs full windows so I can code for it with visual studio
- way lighter than my laptop
- intel i5 cpu, not an atom cpu.
I just tried Unigine Heaven 3 benchmark. It averages around 11fps (at 1080p dx11 with 4x aniso), whereas my desktop gets over 120fps.
So speed on heavy stuff isn't great.
I'm just wondering how the surface pro 2 stacks up. Will this now be your preference for drawing?
cybereality wrote:It's just too bad they didn't go with something more competitive for gaming / game development.
I read an article somewhere saying that Microsoft should use their xbox brand to enter the tablet market. At the time of the article (well before the bad decisions they made with xbox Live which they've had to back peddle) xbox was a solid brand. I found the opinion in the article interesting and it reflects what you're saying cybereality. MS may have entered the tablet arena as a serious competitor if they used the xbox brand and delivered a serious multimedia/gaming tablet. They could also have claimed as a PR stunt that the gaming technology will be used to push business apps to the next level.
I'm just wondering how the surface pro 2 stacks up. Will this now be your preference for drawing?
cybereality wrote:It's just too bad they didn't go with something more competitive for gaming / game development.
I read an article somewhere saying that Microsoft should use their xbox brand to enter the tablet market. At the time of the article (well before the bad decisions they made with xbox Live which they've had to back peddle) xbox was a solid brand. I found the opinion in the article interesting and it reflects what you're saying cybereality. MS may have entered the tablet arena as a serious competitor if they used the xbox brand and delivered a serious multimedia/gaming tablet. They could also have claimed as a PR stunt that the gaming technology will be used to push business apps to the next level.
I expect they will probably do this but with the RT version not pro
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...
Too early to tell.
I charged it 14 hours ago and it still has 26% battery left. But I haven't been using it heavily, just web browsing, idle (mostly) or a short go at running Paradise Sandbox (at 1080p it struggled with hydrax water simulation / skyx, getting around 4fps) in high performance power mode. I'll do some tests on the weekend.
There's some annoyances with windows 8.1:
- in metro, there's no battery life display or network setting icon that I can find. But desktop mode has both in the system tray.
- The wifi access point list doesn't update while visible, when I enable tethering on my phone or another device I need to exit the list then bring it back (both only in desktop mode, can't find it in metro) to see the new point appear.
- Clicking on the right popup toolbar settings icon in metro gives less options than the same thing in desktop (which has a link to the control panel).
- Newly installed programs are in the metro apps list, not in the desktop.
- There's no consistent back or options buttons like android has. I got stuck in IE11 not able to get back to a url bar without hitting the metro home button (a touch sensitive button below the screen) then restarting it.
- Metro apps don't show up in the desktop mode's task bar. I thought I only had a couple of things running, but in task manager I saw a bunch of metro things I'd clicked on still active.
However metro does seem pretty good for tablets. Needs work (like the back button thing, which is mostly in the top left corner but not always), but is still usable.
Being able to use desktop stuff (like explorer windows) on a tablet is great, handy for reading portable hard drives, something that android sucks at. Multi window file browsing with copy/paste/notepad++/etc beats custom full screen apps.
Using the stand at second position it works great on the train on my lap, but only without the keyboard attached. That's ok, on the train I mainly just read stuff, the virtual keyboard is fine then.
I took a look around the city for mini-displayport adapters. I need a vga, dvi and hdmi. Damn they are expensive (mostly only found apple ones). Deal Extreme have them for a fraction of the price. Time for some ordering.
Quick performance test.
Compiling Ogre 1.9 rc2, release build, VC2010.
Surface Pro 2 (dual core tablet, 8gb ram): 5:37s
Desktop PC (hex core, 32gb ram, ssd and velociraptor drive): 2:12s
I think my pc needs a defrag, that time isn't as good as I've had in the past. It might also be a bit unfair because my pc has boost installed (and therefore spreading through ogre and maybe slowing down it's build), while the surface pro 2 doesn't (yet).
But that's still a pretty damn nice time. So it's definitely a compiling friendly system.
Framerates aren't as high. The ogre grass demo was 300fps (800x600, dx9) compared to over 3200fps on my desktop. But that's to be expected with an intel hd4400 mobile gpu compared to a nvidia gtx680 4gb. What's really good is that doing a test run on it with ogre showed only 2 samples that failed (endless terrain and terrain). Everything else ran either without glitches or with the same glitches as my gtx680 (due to dx9 shader bugs in ogre). I've seen enough posts on here from intel gpu owners to know that they aren't the best chip to run ogre on, but this one seems good (apart from those two crashes).
So far, I'm damn happy with this thing. It's not as light or thin as an iPad, but I can do real programming work on it, and the pen is great, especially when used with OneNote. I'm thinking of using the surface pro 2 hooked up to the projector for my classes instead of the classroom's 27" imac, because I can then draw on the screen with the pen instead of the whiteboard (and maybe save copies for the students). Or draw over the top of powerpoints.
Unfortunately OneNote has a problem. There's two versions: OneNote 2013 (standard desktop app, comes with Office) and OneNote for Metro (tablet version, comes with the Surface Pro 2 for free). The Metro version has a touch friendly gui and seems well suited to a tablet, but it's lacking a lot of features (highlighters, hand writing search, line and shape vector drawing, etc). The full OneNote 2013 will run too (this is a full pc afterall), but it's interface really isn't suited to a 10 inch tablet touch screen.
