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I think you (and a few others here) are making the mistake of equating digital art with a need for high-end graphics cards. 99% of what most digital artists consider to be "digital art" does not require state-of-the-art GPUs. Graphic design work, retouching, painting, etc. barely even scratch the surface of what the last generation of graphics cards could handle.

Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs. Apart from a relatively small number of professionals who work with 3D rendering, high-end graphics cards are an even greater waste of money (unless of course you're buying the machine for gaming, which doesn't really fit the "digital artist" target of these machines).

Microsoft and Apple may still be pricing these products too high ("robbing you" as you say), but that's a separate discussion.

This person is a (self-identified) digital artist; if their claims are true, I'm sure they know what digital art does and doesn't require.

The stats for the Cintiq Companion 2 are in the same ballpark and, from personal use, the thing has a hard time providing smooth UI when editing very large photoshop, illustrator, or unity projects.

I think you're right that artists largely don't need what high end gaming PCs might require to play the newest steam titles at full graphics settings, but for what Microsoft is asking here, they do at least need enough GPU/CPU strength to have a very responsive UI when editing very large and complex graphical projects at 2560 x 1600 and beyond.

My worry about the Surface is simply that the minority report-style advertisement isn't really possible with a real-world PSD or 3dsmax scene.

"...I can't help but notice that you (and others here) are making the mistake of equating digital art with a need for high-end graphics cards. 99% of what most digital artists consider to be "digital art" does not require state-of-the-art GPUs. Graphic design work, retouching, painting, etc. barely even scratch the surface of what the last generation of graphics cards could handle..."

I can't help but notice that you are equating that 99% of "digital art" that can be handled by mobile graphics cards, to the 1% of "digital art" that anyone's going to actually PAY someone to produce. As I said, this is a business. If I could make the living I currently make retouching photos, then I'd gladly pay $3000 for an underpowered machine...

but I can't.

because no one is going to pay us that kind of money to retouch photos are they?

Look, these machines, to a business, are INVESTMENTS. You invest for the FUTURE, not to take advantage of the past. A 1070 or 1080 is not too much to ask considering Pascal's MANIFEST superiority in efficiency. Additionally, I was being kind, I think MS should OFFER 64GB in the Surface Studio, but a 128GB option would really be necessary to future proof this thing.

I'll tell you what MS and Apple are going for here... it's a money grab. And they are setting themselves up to come back to guys like me every 18 to 24 months for another mandatory money grab instead of just giving us a 60 month machine from the outset.

Offer me a 60 month Surface Studio at the $3000 price point and I'd update every workstation here. But that's not what they're offering is it?

This is 100% where I'm at. I'd buy a Surface Monitor right now, because I could be assured to use it on a...well, I almost said "a real computer", and I feel a little bad for that, but I also sorta don't. I need forward compatibility with my hardware, and my workstation already blows the doors off the little box they've saddled that great monitor with.

What kind of art are you talking about? I've done much graphic design (yes, paid) and used Photoshop and Illustrator for nearly a decade (though I now use Affinity, as of last year), and I have never been in a situation where I was running out of resources.

Up until this year, I have never owned a machine with more than 8GB of RAM, and never a video card with more than 1GB of RAM until now either.

Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?

To be fair, I think most people's interaction with "graphics arts" is Lightroom, which is a pretty darn slow piece of software. Not the complicated stuff, where they reused code from Photoshop, but the simple stuff like opening the file import dialog.

I think people are imagining that a better computer will improve its performance, but it won't. There's a sleep statement in there or something. (Their blog post says something like "a cloud industry-leading innovation in picking-your-camera-out-of-a-list user experience story flow." Really? Just suck the files off my memory card in the background as soon as you detect one.)

"...Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?.."

Yes. Video editing and CGI. The workflow normally requires the use of MASSIVE memory mapped files. Additionally, a given artist may do several "lo res" renders before shipping off to the farm. ("Lo res" being a relative word. Because in most cases we're talking about 2560x1440 or 1080p minimum.) I really don't see how your tech guys are able to get that to work for you on cards that have 1GB memory. But if they can, then you'd better NEVER let those guys go because they are worth their weight in gold. (Unless you don't do any CGI or video editing???)

Ah I see. Yeah, I don't do any video or CGI.

The two CGI and Animation shops I've worked at have had most of the artists on Linux boxes...

Yes, this is the case in most of all VFX and animation studios. Pretty much everything is done on Linux, usually CentOS. That being said 8GB is a joke. 32GB is minimum and 64GB is what new machines would be ordered with for almost all artist workstations.

Source: I was a system engineer for VFX and animation for a number of years.

Our artists at work were drowning with 8 GB of RAM. Upgrading them to 16 GB made a substantial difference for them.

Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari.

> Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance

Can confirm. Got up to 15GB RAM usage today, before closing 30+ tabs to get back down to 7GB. Maybe it's ridiculous, but based on the information I'm needing from those tabs--100% text--it's infuriating.

Oh, and also sitting awfully comfortably in that 7GB area is Dropbox, which is doing who knows what with all of its RAM...I do like the Linux command line tool though.

I had same issue but at home where my work flow is different. My solution was to use the extension "The great suspender" which sleeps tabs that hasn't been used in a while. Might help you too.

Firefox is even worse. I caught it using 37GB virt the other day on Linux and a pretty significant chunk of RAM too. I don't even have 37GB of physical memory.

"Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari." This is so true. I've recently stopped using Chrome and switched to Safari. Now my 5-year old MacBook Pro runs like butter.

Browsers and web is frankly getting ridiculous. The modern web has a lot going for it but when moving the web forward people seem to completely forget about the efficiency argument. I wonder how much of the worlds power we waste casually like that.

As a developer and a digital artist I am often running multiple VMs, my various development tools and 2-5 Adobe products on top of my 2 browsers and other misc programs. Agreed that for any single piece of digital design software 16gb should be enough (even to a certain extent After Effects). But if I could have a high quality laptop, that runs Adobe software, is Unix-y AND run the whole Adobe suite plus my development tools... (whilst not having to close all my research notes in Firefox)... gee whizz would I throw my money at that.

I'm probably an outlier though so can understand why it doesnt exist.

I don't think you're an outlier at all. 32GB is the absolute minimum I need to get my work done without disk thrashing. If I spent more time on video than audio I'd want 64GB.

That's completely realistic for pro and semi-pro users.

The cost of making a laptop that could take 32GB or even 64GB of RAM must be tiny. No one would care if Apple only supplied 16GB but left a couple of slots free, or even if the stock overpriced 16GB could be swapped for 32GB.

Why cut corners and make "pro" machines that can't be used for professional work?

It's counterproductive. It may increase margins in the short term, but over time it alienates users and erodes the appeal of the brand.

It seems "Think Different" has become "Don't Expect Much."

Most people I know working as professional artists/designers are working with 2D assets in software like photoshop. Even the few working in print don't need crazy GPUs. I know some people who deal with video and 3d but most of them farm out to servers to do the heavy lifting. I'm not sure what you do but in my experience this is more than enough for most digital artists and designers.

I don't know if you saw this posted elsewhere in the thread but this is a pretty solid endorsement: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...

Considering the extremely long time between hardware refresh on the MacBook Pro I entirely share your sentiment and am agog Apple didn't wait for a suitable Kaby Lake part. People have been waiting years, what's another six months? If you're going to charge me top end prices bloody give me top end hardware. It isn't simply top end by definition with a Microsoft or Apple logo plastered on the side, sorry.

I don't care as much if the hardware is "top end", but I do require that it lasts, my surface 3 keyboard didn't last a year.

> Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs.

Look, I'm sorry - I'm with you for most of it, but you have this stick held by completely the wrong end. Gaming consoles are closer to APUs than discrete high-end GPUs.

> gaming console graphics hardware

High end graphics cards are usually much better than a gaming console, in that they offer much better frame-rates, and a lot more resolution, and at the same time even a single card can be more expensive than a complete gaming console.

So, yes, they are for gaming 99.9% of the time. But please don't compare them with consoles.

your rant about GPUs on the Studio for 3k is heavily misguided. What you are paying for with that 3k is mostly the new screen and its capability. The closest rival to that screen is a Wacom tablet which is very near the same price point without all the hardware MS has added. Are you aware of the new stuff that is packed into that one screen? That is the question you need to answer for yourself to understand that price point.

As for having "outdated" cards, that is more a function of the production timeline. I am sure the Studio has been in the works for a while and those were probably the best in class cards around the time.

Pro tip: When you have to explain to people why they shouldn't be disappointed by something they've thought about, you've almost always already lost the argument.

And the video is outdated, period, no air-quotes. There is simply no argument there. Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech.

He is directly rebutting one person's opinion, not coming up with a talking point after consulting with a survey of people's reactions to the new announcements. Who's to say it's not the parent that was mistaken?

Using the Surface as a tablet for drawing has been a huge use-case for visual artists from day 1. Just see this positive review of the original Surface Pro by Gabe from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...

And his follow-up post yesterday on the Studio https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...

That's a pretty good endorsement.

I know several artists who bought the Surface for exactly this reason and found it disappointing. The hardware in the Surface Pro is pretty mediocre unless you spend a lot of money on it (at which point a Cintiq Companion becomes an intriguing idea if you don't know what Wacom's customer support is like).

Most of those artists ended up buying iPad Pros to replace them with.

Another pro tip: when marketing to professionals, they will get it over time. If you're a real professional, you will follow the news, see the reviews and tests, and after a while you will understand new technology that was not properly marketed in the first place.

"Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech"

This is a weird complaint to me. So what if the display hardware is dated if it is perfectly up to the task it's presented with? Maxing out the specs on a machine for no other reason than to max out the specs seems to me to be nothing but a waist.

Depends if you want it to be great for years to come as well.

The GP was the one making the complaint. I have no interest in the device. But if it is important to people, then it is important to people.

And even if it is perfectly suited the the rest of the hardware and any additional RAM/performance would be wasted[1], that's not a good excuse to overcharge for old commodity hardware.

[1] I would be extremely surprised if the rest of the system were designed around the video card. Actually, designed twice, since there are two video card options.

This "digital art graphic card" is starting to sound like "for my Big Data project I need these nonstandard tools and big compute pellets" when all they have is moderate data queries and a batch-processing workflow.

> or LAST GENERATION graphics cards

Not even just that, it's the last gen mobile cards, which means you have to spend 4.2k just to have 4GB of VRAM on something that, at the end of the day, is really a desktop. the 980 desktop version is ~$600 with 6GB VRAM.

Or even an RX480. It could have had 8GB of fast VRAM for less than $300.

that's not what you are paying for.

you are paying for a digital drafting table.

As mentioned in another thread, purchasing the lcd panel itself ala-carte would cost more than the entire unit.

Except that you are paying for it. If it costs money (which is does) and you pay (which you do) then you are very much paying for it. And that's the problem. Not only are the 9 series GPUs a generation behind, the shift to the Pascal architecture delivers previous gen. performance for literally half the price (see GTX 970 vs. 1060).

Maybe the thing you want to pay for is the screen, but there's no avoiding the outdated GPU tax that you have to pay to get it.

You don't even need the desktop 980 to compete with the laptop 980M. The 1060 beats it with a significant gap.

Yeah, but my point was that if they were too far along with old tech, there were still drastically better pre-existing options for a product that isn't really mobile.

I share your surprise that Microsoft didn't use the 1080. I would really love to hear the back story on that, was it getting it to fit? was it power envelope? was it driver support? Etc. I expect that if they pre-sell a million Studios or more we'll see an updated unit ("Studio Pro" anyone?) that is a 64GB/1080 machine but time will tell.

I can't imagine that it was power envelope. Pascal really made progress on power efficiency, which is what makes it even more surprising.

I think the idea that it's a digital drafting table that can also be used as a desktop computer is the right way to think of it (as many have alluded to in this thread).

I wonder why ms didn't stick with AMD (like the xbox one) if they weren't going to use a 1080 (or 1070, might make more sense).

As someone that used to enjoy drawing/doodling but never made the leap from mouse to a digital pen - sketching and doodling on the surface 4 was eye-opening. Any number of programs paired with the pen/screen feels a lot like ink drawing without the mess and with multi-level undo.

The combination of a decent pen and great screen makes for a very satisfying and immediate drawing experience.

AFAIK:

980M - 100W / 1060 ~ 80W / 1070 ~ 120W / 1080 ~ 150W

If they started out with the max TDP of 100W for the cooling system - upgrading it to 150W in that small space it sounds like too much of a change to meet their DL?

Clearly this does not excuse the reengineering but it might explain why they went this route.

You're surprised that they didn't use a top of the line card when most of their target audience will never even make the thing sweat? I have a 1080 and use it to play games at 4k while driving two additional 1080p monitors. It kicks ass and I push it much harder than most digital artists ever will.

Well there are two reasons I was surprised they didn't use the 1080, one was that it is surprisingly hard on a GPU to do the sort of lag free drawing/manipulation. When I'm turning a 3D part around in "quality" render mode in TurboCAD and modifying it on the fly it works out the GPU fairly well. Unlike games its pretty much forced to recompute lighting fairly often.

The other was that they have already crossed over the "luxury" threshold from "just another PC" to "special hotness" sort of territory. So unless Nvidia is giving them a smoking deal on "old" GPU's it seems that from a marketing perspective you would want to check off all the boxes. Its reported that it would use less power and generate less heat, and Nvidia says it is 20% faster. That seems like it would be a "no brainer". But I clearly don't know.

That is why it surprised me when I read the high end Studio only had the GTX980 in it.

> when most of their target audience will never even make the thing sweat

Really? First thing I thought when I saw it was how cool it would be for 3D sculpting. There are more uses for high end GPUs than gaming.

Of course there are people who will, but there are more who won't and thing that e.g. Photoshop requires a 1070 or better.

While I really like the look of the Surface Studio I was shocked at the GPU choice and the fact it comes with a hybrid drive. I mean I do think it is still a good machine even for the price but come on!

What's wrong with a hybrid drive?

They are not as fast as an SSD.

In some use cases they are, since they contain an SSD as a large cache. They are also a lot cheaper than an SSD, so it's nice to get some of the benefits without all the cost.

For me solid state > moving parts. Faster and run cooler.

Edit: afaik the only moving part in the Surface Studio are the fans. Replacing a fan is an annoyance but at least it won't lead to data loss!

Oh, heck. Didn't notice that, yet. That's a bit rough!

I don't understand how the bump in graphics card hardware matters to your drawing workflow.

Driving that 16mln pixel screen needs some graphic power today, tomorrow it will be even more resource hungry

I am also puzzled by this... Maybe knowing they have more horsepower than they need empowers them. Or maybe they are doing a lot of high poly 3D work or something.

Photoshop, and many other gfx software use GPU acceleration since 5+ years ago.

And almost none of those apps are going to max out an Iris Pro, let alone a 980M.

They don't need to "max out" a card, because PS is not a game.

What counts is the time it takes to perform an operation like a Camera RAW import or a blur. If that goes down by a significant percentage, productivity goes up by a significant amount.

For drawing, good acceleration is the difference between a distracting experience that's laggy and unusable, and a smooth experience that gets out of the way of the work.

Besides, there are people with an interest in art and machine learning. Good luck with a 980M if that's your area of interest.

Not to the level people in this thread think they do.

Maybe the potential to use the $3000 computer for something else than drawing?

The architects at Foster + Partners designing the Apple campus use Revit and being architects they want the coolest tech. Surface Studio hits that sweetspot better than anything from Apple at the moment.

I'm struggling to believe you're a digital artist if you're complaining about the Surface Studio. A Cintiq monitor, with no computer, costs nearly what the surface studio does, and gives you an inferior display to boot.

The machine is not "purportedly about graphics", it's about 2D artists, and they made that clear in pretty much every presentation I've seen on the device.

Ok graphics shouldn't really be that big of a problem, if companies were trying to maximize it. Instead, they're trying to minimize the footprint of the actual computer without sacrificing productivity capabilities. Luckily, this provides incentive for the eGPU market, which will hopefully give us compact devices with modular powerful computing specs.

>> And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980???

Not only that- it's a mobile processor, 980M, so it would lag some distance behind a 980. That is cutting serious corners for a desktop at that price point.

You go on and on about specs. Nobody cares about specs. Just see this MacBook landing page, it's full of meaningless percentage numbers.

70% faster, they could just as well write "new recipe".

Actual graphics and design pros (as opposed to Apple 'Pros') absolutely care about specs. Come hang out in VR developer land for a while, where interest in specs extends to system architecture choices.

Isn't something like the Mac Pro aimed more at you? It's packed with graphics hardware. Although admittedly they haven't updated that for several years.