Thoughts on 1080 screen available on 2015 Razer Blade

With availability of the 1080 IPS screen option on the newly announced 2015 Razer, I thought I might mention a point that I think is a caveat against going with this resolution on a dual-GPU gaming laptop, if you ever play games or otherwise normally use your laptop at lower than 1080p resolutions.

The NVidia Optimus technique used in the Razer Blade, which allows GPU switching for playing games on the NVidia GPU and doing other, less graphically intense activities on the less power hungry Intel HD Graphics GPU, relies on the Intel driver managing some aspects of the display, even when the NVidia GPU is active.

For some (not all) games, this introduces a problem if you wish to play the game full-screen at non-native resolutions. For those games (my examples include the newly-released "Dying Light" and Ubisoft's "Watch Dogs", but I suspect there are many, many others), attempting to set the game's video settings to use the full-screen but at a less-than-native resolution will result in the game display being rendered centered on the panel's native resolution, with no full-screen scaling taking place.

The work-around for this, with all current Intel driver versions, is to set Windows' desktop resolution to any setting less than the panel's native resolution (for example, with Razer's 3200 x 1800 pixel screen, you could use 2048 x 1152 as the desktop resolution). Doing so enables the "Scale Full Screen" setting to be selected under the Display->Scaling portion of Intel's "Graphics Properties" utility (normally available via a right-click on the Windows Desktop). Setting "Display->Scaling->Scale Full Screen" will allow the affected games to be played full-screen at less than native resolution while scaling the lower-resolution to the panel's full screen size.

My caveat comes in here: If you choose a 1080 resolution screen on your gaming laptop and wish to play one of these games at anything less than 1080p resolution (for example, I'm running both Skyrim and Dying Light at 720p, but with nearly full eye-candy turned on, and getting frame rates that often exceed 70-80 fps by using 1280 x 720 resolution), you're going to have to set your Windows desktop resolution below 1080p. This will be an issue for most latest versions of Windows, as less than a 1080p desktop will cause problems with many programs, apps and dialog boxes which cannot fit their content into less than 1080 vertical pixels.

With the 3200 pixel display, however, this problem is largely alleviated. You can set your desktop resolution down to a still-very-generous 2048 x 1152, allowing the Intel driver to make use of the "Scale Full Screen" option for gaming, and play full-screen games at anything less than 2048 x 1152 without scaling issues.

Just a thought that occurred to me based on my recent gaming experiences on the 2014 Razer Blade.

 

Why get a 3k display and only use 2k?

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Just FYI. This is fixable with the newest Intel GPU drivers. Select new option in the settings called "Maintain Aspect Ratio" and it keeps everything perfect when displaying at non-native resolutions.

 

Doesn't work with some games for me.

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Couple of points here:
1) If I would have had the ability to buy a 1080 screen when the 2014 model came out, I would have - I didn't think I had a need for a 3k screen, and didn't plan on running games at that resolution, anyway. But that's how the machine came, so that's what I got.
2) I am not in love with 3k desktop resolution on Windows, mainly due to some apps not being HiDpi aware, even now. However, under perfect conditions, I would choose the 3k resolution as my default.
3) In the imperfect world we are living in, I find the 3k screen, set down to 2.5k at the desktop, is a decent work-around for both desktop use (minimizes problems with non-HiDpi apps, as a bit of serendipity) and frequent gaming at lower resolutions, which I prefer for performance reasons.
Given that I desire to use a laptop for my gaming, this machine has been an OK choice. Although it isn't really powerful enough or cool-running enough to do current games at 3k resolution with decent performance, it is OK for 1080p and 720p gaming for must games I'm interested in.
I just thought others might want another data point to think about on the 1080 vs 3200 screen choice now available. If I was buying today, I would definitely go for the 3200 screen, although I might not use it at that resolution for either desktop computing or gaming.

 

Have you actually tested the latest Intel driver? It's a few weeks old. Before installing it and changing the option pretty much any newish game (and pretty much all Assassin's Creed games) would do that. Works fine now.

 

I don't see the benefit of a 3k screen. Glossy and reflective, scaling issues, shorter battery life and probably increases heat too.

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Well, this may be an occasion for me to get spanked for running a pre-release OS as my daily driver. I'm running Windows 10 Tech Preview (9926), and cannot change the default Intel driver to the newer one released in January. The install runs, but after rebooting, the driver version has not changed. Seems to be by design, if my Google-fu is accurate. Intel and Microsoft apparently allow the driver to be installed on Surface Pro 3 machines, but not on other platforms running Windows 10.

Therefore, I am stuck with the Intel driver dated in 2013. The option you are speaking of, "Maintain Display Scaling" is the default and only choice when in 3k desktop mode, but a couple of my games just get centered on the 3k display space when running less than native resolution at full screen. This was why I hunted around and found the "Set your desktop resolution down" solution which I have adopted of late.

I'll wait until Intel releases a newer driver for the pre-release version of Windows, or just keep doing what I'm doing for now. If I have to wait until Fall for official release, so be it. I really don't mind running 2048 x 1152 much at all.

Thanks for your comment. I'll watch out for a newer driver and try again.

 

Setting the desktop res down wasn't working for me on a few games including AC:U. I started researching and found out the iGPU actually handles all of the display and offloads the rendering tasks to the dGPU which prompted me to check for an upgrade. The maintain desktop scaling is actually missing in 1080p for me before the driver update, it WAS showing up in 3k though but even that didn't work when playing a game in 1080p, it still centered it without scaling. After the driver update it worked. MIGHT be a bug in the Intel driver. You could always dual boot Win 10 or there's a method to install Win 10 into a VHD and set up a boot menu so you can boot INTO the VHD. It was an option that came out as part of Windows 7 and has been integrated ever since.

 

About the 1080p screen - why do why do razor assume that just because you don't want a 4K touch screen you want to nerf the memory and storage too?

 

Seconded; I need that 16GB if this is to double as a work machine. Bummed about the memory; not so much about the storage.

 

It's more for photo editing and what not .........

 

Razer didn't assume that, they're telling you that LOL

 

Heavier too

 

are the RAM soldered on?

 

Yes

 

could someone who owns the 1080p version chime in and give us your thoughts? how's the quality of the display? any light bleed or ghosting issues? how is the battery life?