So Microsoft is finally addressing the elephant in the room. if you're like many enthusiasts who use 1440p or even 4k monitors you have most likely been frustrated for years because the scaling on Windows is an absolute mess for high resolutions displays.. WELL FEAR NOT, Microsoft is going to finally address the issue on a future Windows update. Now you're probably wondering.. Why is it that they are deciding to fix this now? well apparently it's because on the Surface Pro 4 and on the Surface Book. with their absurdly high resolution displays, many owners have been complaining that scaling is a real issue. everything is tiny and they cannot do anything even in touch mode. so Now Microsoft has decided to fix it. the scaling issue has gone probably as far back as to the late Vista early Windows 7 days. scaling was an absolute mess and after so many years it's finally being addressed.
If you contemplated buying a Surface Pro 4 and or Surface Book, you may want to wait a bit. As of now there are some issues that are effecting the product right now. the issues are as follows.
- Dead on Arrival
- Random Crashes and Lockups
- Surface Book systems working fine until they're updated, following which they fail to load.
- Surface Book systems failing to boot when in the dock.
- Detaching the Surface Book from the dock results in an error (the most common being related to Search UI)
- Strange screen color temperature issue when scrolling web pages.
- Random display driver crashes displayed every 10 to 20 minutes.
- Random Trackpad Freezes.
- Problems physically connecting / disconnecting the dock, with some users ending up with the screen half-disconnected.
- A screen wobble due to a weight imbalance between the screen and keyboard.
- No ambient light sensor controlling the brightness of the backlit keys.
- Concerns about the strength of the hinge.
- Dell 34″ U-Wide cannot be used with the dock. Screen goes black every 2-3 minutes for 10 seconds or so.
- Cannot boot with the dock.
- Playing MPEG files on the laptop works fine, playing them connected to the dock will give an unable to decode error sometimes, program closes other times, and plays. After it errors out 2-3 times it refuses to play until reboot.
- Going to a web page where there are a lot of animations or movement causes a black screen, won't come back until
you undock / redock the Surface.
This is very massive list of issues. if you seriously want a surface right now it's best to wait. mind you some of these issues are Surface Book related. but it's expected on the Surface Pro 4 as well.
AMD is on the verge of dropping the R9-380x which is an Antigua XT based GPU (Or a Revamped Tonga) it will feature similar but better specifications as the R9-380. here's a comparison..
Now to add on to the rumor mill; there is some rumors stating it performs exactly under the R9-290. which begs the question. WHY DO YOU EXIST? Either way it's allegedly coming in November and probably to compete with the 960. which is strange because the R9-380 beats the 960 anyways so why the existence of the card to begin with..
Catalyst Omega 2.0 is coming in November and is allegedly going to be an significant upgrade over Catalyst Omega 1.0 (Which was released in 2014)
Catalyst Omega 2.0 drivers are expected to launch at the same time as last year, according to the report. Which means that we are looking at AMD making this a regular thing with significant upgrades to the Catalyst Omega which is delivered yearly. While there is not much details on what exactly the update will deliver this time. all we there is to know is updates on all the stuff delivered last year. which added support for Freesync for example and added a lot of worthy features. this was delivered last year
November is looking to be an exciting month for technology. hopefully we get some worthy upgrades that live up to the hype or it may be a very very bad christmas.
Microsoft Sources:
- http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/surface-book-reportedly-plagued-by-early-bugs-hardware-issues-1307594
- http://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-book-suffers-from-launch-day-bugs/
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/10/27/microsoft-surface-book-hit-with-early-problems-already/
- http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-10-getting-dpi-improvements-info-way
AMD Sources:
- http://wccftech.com/second-special-edition-drivers-amd-november-catalyst/
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https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://www.expreview.com/43614.html&prev=search
[this source is in Chinese i believe.] - http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r9-380x-confirmed-feature-256bit-bus-4-gb-gddr5-vram-antigua-xt-arriving-consumers-november/
- http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/214339-is-amd-prepping-a-new-r9-380x-to-tackle-the-midrange