Has anyone had hands-on experience with the new 15" Surface Laptop 3’s? I’m particularly interested in how they perform for WoW. Thinking of upgrading from my 2012 15" MBP with an i7 and GT 650M.
id have to imagine performance would be entirely up to the GPU. I know they have discrete GPUs, but aren’t they like that low-end “its technically a discrete GPU” GT 150M or whatever it is called?
So… low settings? Its got plenty of CPU muscle for “ok” framerates, so…
It’s got AMD Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics Microsoft Surface® Edition, whatever that means. I think they’re integrated, but they might perform OK. I play WoW on mobile maybe twice a year tops, but it’s nice to have the ability to do so. I would imagine this laptop plays pretty similarly to how other ultrabooks do, but I was curious if it might be able to wring out a little better performance than my MBP.
Edit: The more I look into it, the more I think I’ll skip this gen (at least). I use my laptop primarily to lecture and give talks from, and the lack of an HDMI port I think kills this laptop as an option for me. My MBP works great but has incompatibility with some classroom setups because of copyright protection features in MacOS that don’t play nice with some of our HDMI equipment.
Vega 11 is what is in the 2400/3400G desktop - i imagine the “Surface Edition” is probably just clocked a little lower.
The Vega 11 can run 1080p/medium settings in a lot of games at very playable framerates; it plays Classic just fine at 1080p and settings around 7 on my HTPC (2400G).
So, better than the MBP by far, most likely.
Edit: Yeah, looking at it, this is a Ryzen-based Surface, so its a mobile Ryzen APU - so the Vega 11 is likely just a downclocked version of what is in the 2400/3400G desktop parts, so itll be quite a bit better than the old MBP and any Intel integrated solution and even that discrete Nvidia MX 150 or whatever it is.
Its got USB-C, though, and you can get a USB-C to HDMI adapter for like 15$. I have one i use with my Surface Go and it works just fine, supporting up to 4k/30fps.
Edit: It also has a Surface Connect port so you can get a dock for it that will have all sorts of ports on it including HDMI and DP.
… ive never even heard of such a problem. That would mean that the HDMI equipment isnt even HDCP 1.0 compliant or something… and i’d have to imagine you’d have exactly the same problems with Win 10.
I (also) have a 2012 MBP (i7, 16GB of RAM) and ive never had an issue plugging it into literally anything with an HDMI port (using the Mini-DP/Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter).
Thanks for the info. I’m not super keen on using a dongle, especially one that takes up the charging port, but the battery life might make it OK.
You’re right about the HDCP compliance. The Windows 10 PC that was tried on the same connection worked fine, but my Mac would not transmit an image. The extra hardware causing the problem was being used to provide audio over HDMI. I believe the native connection did not support HDMI audio, though I was unable to look at the hardware myself. Tech was able to get my Mac to transmit image over HDMI when they removed the audio hardware, but that was only a temporary fix.
Also, it turns out there is an Intel version of the Surface Laptop 3 that is only available to enterprise and education customers. Its cores perform much better than the AMD version that most consumers have access to, and benchmarks show the iGPU on the Intel chip outperform the Vega 11 graphics on the AMD one. I’m going to look into that one. I think it’s a 10nm part. I’d rather get 10nm cores and new Intel graphics over Zen+ and old Vega graphics. The Intel version also gets an extra hour of battery life.
Yeah, if they are the 10nm parts they have the Gen11 iGPUs, which are supposedly a big uplift over the Gen 9 parts we’re used to.
Surprised they outdo the Vega 11, though. At least the Desktop Vega 11 in my 2400G is quite a capable little thing. 1080p medium settings 60fps in most games.
Also, if its anything like the Surface Go, while it CAN be charged over USB-C, it will come with a power adapter that uses the Surface Port, which will charge it about 20x faster. So you dont really have to worry about that.
And if it matters, you can get the one i use with my Surface Go (i actually bought it just to have a USB-C dongle/hub available) - its got an HDMI out, 2x USB 3.0 Type-A, and on the back is a passthrough for USB-C power, so you can use the dongle and power.
Edit: I have this one:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/487465/inland-usb-31-(gen-1-type-c)-to-usb-31-(gen-1-type-a)-2-port-hub--hdmi---60w-power-delivery---black
I also have a USB-C to HDMI 2.0 cable that is just a straight cable:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0727QQLV2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I bought it hoping i could use it on my 2400G (my HTPC) to get 4k/60, without realizing that the USB-C ports on desktop motherboards arent wired to carry video signal (for them to do that, they have to a weird internal Display Port port that you run a cable from the GPU, to the internal DP port, so that the USB-C port can get a DP signal to pass in the first place) - but it works great with the Surface Go (as laptops usually have their USB-C ports that have traces to the GPU in the laptop so they CAN output a video signal) and supports 4k60 even on the Go (which has a weaksauce Pentium Gold with HD 630 or something…)
(Thankfully, i found out later that with an EFI update, the HDMI ports on B450 boards can be “upgraded” to 2.0 and transmit 4k/60 if you have an APU. So that worked out in the end.