SB w/ perf base. Laggy, slow animations and desktop in Win10.

[Adam Drew]

I just bought a SB with the Performance Base. i7/16gb/512/dGPU. From the moment I started using it UI performance has been awful. With nothing going on but a couple of open idle apps all Win10 animations, such as opening the overview of open windows, switching desktops, etc is slow and laggy. I can't figure out how to measure FPS outside of a game but it seems like FPS for Windows is probably 15-20 fps. The worst is seen when using virtual desktops. After switching desktops any UWP apps will lag or hang for second, they'll redraw, resize elements (as though desktop scaling changed) or the cursor will turn into the blue loading circle.

This system is around 24 hours old and is basically stock. I've only installed 2 Win32 apps; everything else is from the store. I've installed all updates including Creators. The only "weird" thing I've done is install the display driver from Nvidia, but I only did that in the course of troubleshooting and it had no effect one way or the other. CPU is basically idle, nothing is going on in the background.

 

[Dratwister]

Try to factory reset the machine and see if the issues're still there.
If even after the factory reset, it's still there, try to call for replacement.

PS: Before trying factory reset, did you try to reinstall the GPU driver or rollback to previous version?

 

[Adam Drew]

I went to the Microsoft store for an Answer Desk appointment. I was able to reproduce the performance issues on every Surface Book in the store, including the non-demo units they had without the demo image. It's got to be a bug in Creators. If you have a Surface Book with creators you can reproduce it too. Create multiple desktops, open a different UWP app on each one (heavier apps will be worse, so Edge, Groove, Store, and Mail work well to reproduce it) and then switch desktops. You'll have slow, stuttering animations.

I tried rolling back the Nvidia update but, as you'd expect, it didn't change anything. The tech at the Microsoft store tried installing the Intel GPU driver direct from Intel and it didn't change anything. I'm left with the decision to either keep the system and see if they get an update out or get a different system that doesn't have this issue. I tested Dell, HP, and Razer systems and they didn't have the same problem.