You mean
this piece of news? Who owns the factory shouldn't matter much. It's still on Japanese ground, meaning a high-cost labour force, and this takeover doesn't lend the factory a breakthrough in the manufacturing process to reduce cost. I agree that price will drop over time as the technology matures, but I don't think we have enough to go by to predict a sudden and major price drop.
Even if Apple relies more heavily on Foxconn than most, Foxconn is big enough to have the tech industry as a whole reliant on them. Last I checked, iPhones weren't dirt cheap. Sure, the iPhone may have a higher profit margin than most other smartphones out there, but the BOM isn't all that different from other current generation high-end smartphones. IGZO is cheaper than OLED, but not (LED-lit) LCD. I fail to see how the advantages of IGZO would justify the extra cost when used in home appliances.
IGZO stands for Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide and is a transparent compound semiconductor produced by Sharp. It's what the pixels are made of and the main advantage of the semiconductor is its higher conductivity, which in turn allows screens to be made denser than traditional aSi TFTs and the power draw of each pixel to be lower. IGZO displays usually have an LED light source. In-plane switching (IPS) is the name of a display technology that
allows for greater viewing angles than traditional TN panels; it's not a certification. In LCDs that make use of in-plane switching, the molecules of the liquid crystal layer between the glass substrates are arranged differently than in a TN matrix. IPS is not applicable to IGZO since the molecules in the LC layer are obviously differently arranged and oriented when the silicon semiconductor has been replaced.
You know what? You're absolutely right. I might actually see myself being happy with the Panasonic panel for the entire lifespan of the notebook.
Since the full 8GB of VRAM becomes available when upgrading to Windows 10, the Aorus X5 handles 3K G-Sync gaming with aplomb. I thought a DirectX 12 title would be needed to make use of the secondary graphics card's VRAM, and that perhaps the graphics cards would even have to support DirectX 12 natively, but sure enough, when I fired up GTA V, a DirectX 11 title, the settings screen greeted me with 8109 MB of available video memory.
* At 3K on a 15.6" display, the pixel density is high enough for MSAA to become more or less redundant, which in turn means that there's not a whole lot to be gained visually from native gaming at 4K on this screen size, not that I was planning to render at a resolution that high. A 4K panel could still become tempting from a scaling standpoint when next-gen titles become too demanding for the graphics hardware to keep up at 3K, but as of now, 3K strikes a good balance for this notebook.
There's also Windows scaling to take into account. Going from Windows 8 to 10 may actually be a step backwards in that regard. Even if 4K at 200% scaling can be better than 3K at 150 or 175% scaling, Windows 10 has not made any advances when it comes to elements that don't scale at all. I have good enough eyesight to be able to read the text in those comically small windows without squinting, but I can't say for sure if I'd struggle or not if they had shrunk further due to an even higher resolution. A 4K panel would be able to run Windows at 1080p very well, but that'd be a sacrifice from a productivity and clarity standpoint.
Then there's video. As stated before, the PPI is high enough to not gain much by going from 3K to 4K, but what about scaling? With the X5, you have enough power to even enable demanding luma and chroma doubling using NNEDI3 in madVR along with the usual CPU-bound scaling techniques. Despite all commercial video content being made in a resolution that differs from the X5's, scaling is not an issue if you can live with some fan noise.
What about the image quality by itself? Sure, ~600:1 is a little on the short side, slight light bleeding along the edges can become apparent, and a tad richer blacks and colour coverage would have lent demanding images that extra bit of depth, but from a media consumption perspective, the panel is very nice. The fine-grained matte coating, high pixel density, and good factory calibration make the display thoroughly pleasant to behold. Maybe I'll sing a different tune once the bliss of having a new notebook has subsided.
*Could anyone chime in on the available video memory in GTA V? Wouldn't Microsoft have made a bigger splash about Windows 10's ability to combine VRAM in SLI setups if it also worked on non-DX12 titles? Is GTA V reporting more VRAM than it's able to allocate, perhaps combining VRAM with slower CPU RAM as a result?
Last edited:
Aug 18, 2015
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