surface pro 3 + unity

Recently I met someone running unity on a surface pro 3 and it looked great. I also love how light it is and that it could compliment my macbook to give me a PC machine as well that I could use to draw with.

Does anyone have any experience with this and any "got ya" type things you should be aware of if you buy one?

How long would the battery last using Unity/Creative cloud apps as the main things used?

I assume no problems uploading to windows store with it and developing android/windows phone apps?

 

Forget light and mac'ish... I wanna know how well the fujitsu t734 and t90x's run unity. I did a bunch of research on the surface, and for light work it is OK, but in tensive stuff will really tax the GPU. I'm sure like mobile development and art would go fine (maybe slow build time) on the surface, but pc games, or more complex mobile games would start to show it's weaknesses. I'll admit the surface looks cool, I like the design, but I need more power! More CPU, more GPU...

BTW the Fujitsu T734 is a convertible notebook with wacom digitizer, and full power I series CPU

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Fujitsu-LifeBook-T734-Convertible-Review.126985.0.html

 

i am unlikely to make overly heavy stuff because I am 1 man dev team (even at work). I am looking for super light and easy to carry, but capable of doing everything. Also the being able to write notes is very appealing to me.

I have a macbook pro with full specs for anything heavy.

 

Well the Fujitsu t902 is fast, and light, and thin. Probably much faster than surface. I guess it comes down to whether you need portability and battery life first (surface pro 3 i5), or functionality and performance first (Fujitsu t734 i7, followed closely by t902 i7)

I really strongly considered the surface, and decided I need to build fast. I need a tough machine as well, and the bulky (in comparison) Fujitsu t734 is next on my list, leaving out the surface pro 3. Plus you can get these high end Fujitsu machines on ebay, refurbished by Fujitsu, for a third of retail (retail is like 1500 to 2k) then install the i7 and have a beast, with wacom pen!

If the pro had nvidia gfx I'd be sold. (I7 model is a must for me if I went for that)

Edit: another thing that bothered me about the surface pro was lack of included keyboard. In fact they wax you on that keyboard! I guess combined still much cheaper than these Fujitsu convertibles....

Edit2: oh if you buy a surface, let us know how it works out lol. I'm sure it can be a cool machine, I've just got less than unlimited funds and gotta get the most bang for my buck really, considering I'll probably use a machine for years and years before upgrading.

 

I would get the top of the line so the i7 Surface pro.
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store...DisplayProductDetailsPage&productID=310961000

It wouldn't be my main computer, just an on the train/take to to meetings/ deploy to windows store. However I am sick of drawing with the mouse and my drawing tablet just isn't the same as drawing on the screen! So the pen is obviously super attractive(tried drawing on an ipad but don't enjoy it.

I have kind of been drawn to it cause I have a $600 off voucher from having creative cloud which is making it very attractive.

 

Ohhhh 600 bucks off is... pretty much yeah get that haha.

Anyway I am sure it packs enough power in that i7 version to be usable for even moderate mobile games. I use lesser hardware myself, and i3 notebook (no fancy pen for me ) currently, and I am in the same boat looking for a good digitizer pen device, that runs windows, and unity.

I have to say if I had the 600 off I might just jump ship to the surface, even if down the road you upgrade to another more powerful pen having device.

With that said, I still love love love the T734 (I hope I made it painfully clear already theses fujitsu convertibles screens flip around, allowing you to draw in tablet mode with wacom pen...), for a few major reasons - durability, power, and wacom branded digitizer (the new surface pro 3 uses an alternative one, not sure what kind/brand). I have heard the pro 3 one is pretty solid - but I really trust wacom, I have used their stuff before.

That to me means I won't bust something toting it around in a backpack on campus, plus I can crunch unity, photoshop, and a variety of other apps at one time, and I'll have plenty of ports and even an option for a second battery instead of DVD drive... and all that with a nice wacom pen to get my pressure sensitivity on in photoshop.

The thing is, the screen on the T734 is not super fantastic. It isn't bad either, but the newer T904 (I been saying T902 meaning T904 earlier btw) actually has a like huge resolution, on the 13 inch screen. It blows most modern notebooks/convertibles (including the surface models) out of the water in overall screen resolution. I guess if your really leaning more towards art on the go - that bad boy packs a punch while still being fairly thin and lightweight, and has a beautiful screen (plus the wacom digitizer!)

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Fujitsu-Lifebook-T904-Convertible.115876.0.html

Ok I better shut up I could go on forever about this crap haha.

 

It looks impressive but at 2.5x the weight of a surface pro that is too much for me. I already have a laptop. That review also pummelled the sound and would like some audio! I have seen the convertibles before but I ended up getting a MacBook cause the apple store. If I was going to get one of them that would of been the time!

I would carry this in addition to my MacBook sometimes so weight is a big deal.

I have played with the pen on the surface and loved it, but I have never actually tried a wacom one. I only do a bit of art (draw cartoons, basic photoshop etc) so I don't need absolute top of the line.

To add to the $600 off it would be a good tax deduction so I would get 40% of the price back in 6 months. So that means it will cost me a bit less than 1K Australian for the top of the range.

 

I have the Core i5 256gb model with 8 gigs of ram! It's been so awesome. I originally got it for hot days so I could flee the room I'm in, how ever sense then it's taken over my laptop as my go to computer.

Unity(4.6) works alright how ever it is blurry and ugly, due to seemingly forcing a lower resolution. The play window also suffers from this, so emulating a screen like say 720p is not possible. Touch input doesn't work in the play window so you can't test your game directly in that, but you can build and play on the device which is cool, except windows store builds take forever(mine is the core i5 version though) The editor buttons are pretty hard to hit with touch and because of this I'd say the Unity editor is pretty much unusable without the type cover.

Windows app development seems to be fine, visual studio causes some issues with a few settings but it's just one service that needs to be disabled. I haven't tried the Android SDK but I think it will work fine.

I've been trying creative cloud out recently and Photoshop seems like a dream(I've only used this on the surface for a day, and I'm a novice at it) full palm rejection is nice and the pressure sensitivity is actually pretty good considering it's such a lower resolution then the Wacom ones, I can't tell the difference between the Surface Pro 3 and the Wacom Bamboo even though i'm pretty sure the bamboo is something like 1024 compared to the surfaces 256. Illustrator doesn't seem to have palm rejection so IDK about that. I haven't tried the others in creative suite on it yet.

The device has awesome build quality, it's like 99% good... the only flaw is there's some plastic on the underside of the kickstand that has got the paint scratched off and looks a bit ugly, but it's hard to notice. The type cover is quite nice how ever lots of the time it just doesn't recognize it's attached and that's annoying.

I'd recommend it, the battery is really good but I don't have any numbers at the moment.

 

is yours a surface pro 3 or one of the earlier models?

The play button on the unity interface is pretty small. I imagine it is well below the minimum required size for a touch screen.

Using unity with just a touch screen probably isn't going to be something people do.

When you say the interface is blurry what do you mean by that? The one I saw looked perfect.

 

Mines a Surface Pro 3, the blurry may just be more of a issue with it not being the high res? It certainly isn't perfect, but it's not to bad.

 

could you make a screenshot so I could see? I thought the resolution on it should of been enough.

 

It might not be 100% clear in the image, but if you zoom in you can see strange pixel smoothing of some kind?

 

I have the Surface Pro 3 i7 model with 8 gigabytes of memory and and 256 gigabyte hard drive. I also splurged on the dock and hooked it to an external monitor. Here's what my setup looks like:



It runs Unity just fine, but I always run it on the external monitor because the built-in monitor is too cramped. I don't regret buying it at all and the pen is a delight and a nice added bonus for sketching and note taking. I haven't noticed any blurriness at all, though I did have to use an unfortunate hack to get it to use the native resolution of the external monitor.

I'm quite happy with it. It's my main development machine at my day job now. But I wouldn't use it for development work without an external monitor.

HTH

 

thank you both. That helps a lot.

I have been reading reviews and getting more tempted. Will wait until my next pay to be sure I want it and not just being wowed by how much it will cost!

 

I'm really interested in one, but don't want to spend $2k + on one at this stage because I'm not really sure I'd use it a lot.

The main thing is that I hear it's a bit of a pain to use as a laptop on your lap because it's just the keyboard and two edges for contact, it's not rigid like a laptop and it's so light it's not really stable. I mainly want it for coding, but playing with (mostly simple) Unity scenes and being able to work on documents/images are also high on my list.

With coding, the quality and layout of the (super expensive!) keyboard is also a concern.


Someone mentioned speakers and sound before. Quite honestly, the speakers built into a portable computer have never been a concern to me, and I'm a guy who likes speakers. The thing is that so much has to be compromised to get speakers into a laptop that if you really care about sound you're not going to bother with them. Plug in a decent set of headphones or earphones, everything will be way better and you don't have to pay a premium for some marketably-branded built-in speakers.

Laptop speakers should be functional. They need to be able to tell you about errors, make clearly audible human voice for Skype and such, and make sure you're covered for showing other people the odd video or whatever. They should not try to be the Big Day Out, because they can't.

@TheRaider, how'd you come by that discount?

 

With the type cover attached it can be a little uncomfortable, and on your lap the type cover is likely to move a little bit while typing. But it's Ok.

The speakers are alright , better then those on my Samsung laptop and Macbook (Non pro from like 2008)

 

Adobe just emailed it to me for being an adobe cloud user. It is only valid for the 2 top models I think.

I am starting to think if it is valid for the 256 gig model I will just get that cause then it would be super cheap.

 

But does that include the i7? Gots to have that i7!

 

It does but the voucher is only valid for the 512(i read the fine print!) so i am back up to the top model which has me a little boarderline on price.

 

Well I took the plunge and bought it!!!! looking forward to having a windows laptop again to go with my MacBook

 

Good luck

 

I like the kickstand a lot for using it as a tablet on the couch.

 

Have you been using unity with it? No problems so far? Fairly fast to boot and to do build out to devices and stuff?

 

I got the S3 I5 with 8gb of ram for pretty much exactly this. Super fast sweet machine. It's hard doing graphical stuff on that screen, but development is fine. Everything including unity so far has run very fast and without issues. When I decide to go from my mac in the office to my surface in bed it's just right

I'm not even a "Windows" person necessarily, but really a great product Microsoft put out. I can understand people's hesitance to get one esp consider the OS and the price. I just love how light weight it is, and the fact that it's basically a tablet that has a full blown OS on it.

 

Let us know if you guys run into any heat/throttling issues.

 

No problems so far. I have just been installing software so haven't really got to using it.

Unity, cc, harmony, maya.. takes a while via wifi!

I do really like the device. I still haven't figured if it fits into my work workflow or just my home workflow. I really want to use oneNote and the pen for taking notes, but I want to keep using my macBook pro for development cause it is a good machine (top of the line).

I am looking forward to really getting to play with it.

It is so quiet! I am blown away with how silent it is.

 

So I have finally really got to use it a bit and here are my thoughts in dot points:

-Had to install a lot of windows updates to start which makes ages on wifi (ethernet is a must but even the install part took a long time) so I bought a USB ethernet adapter.
-Some software didn't work properly with pen until I updated pen drivers which doesn't happen as part of windows update (which seems crazy to me as it is part of the device)
-It takes a fair bit longer to open programs than my Macbook pro (I know they aren't like devices but all I have to compare against) however once open they run well and very responsive.
-Unity doesn't support the pen Don't really get why as everything else accepts it as a mouse alternative.
-Photoshop, illustrator, harmony, maya all great with the pen
-Device can get fairly hot but hasn't bothered me cause kickstand raises it
-Touchpad on keyboard not as nice as on my Mac
-Gorgeous design and head turning. Super light
-As reported in this thread sometimes parts of unity get a little blurry which is weird cause this doesn't happen to other apps.

No regrets on the purchase except my discount only ended up coming to 400 not 550 which I am still arguing with the store about. However I will keep it no matter what the outcome is as I had been considering buying it full price anyway.

I do need to get used to trying to use some of my art software without a keyboard for the train.

 

Probably something to do with Unity being fully 3D rendered (even the parts that aren't 3D) where most other apps aren't.

How's performance with moderately complex scenes?

 

Most of my games aren't exactly high demand, but one thing I did which has some high poly models and reads in 8 webcam streams ran fine in the editor. Of the projects I opened nothing felt different to me compared to my MacBook.

Most of my stuff is aimed at mobile devices so they aren't that demanding.

 

I'm not positive but I had thought I read somewhere that a user had posted a fix for pen input being mouse emulated in unity to fix that problem - not 100 percent on that as it was when I was just skimming through threads and blogs researching the surface and unity a while back and that's been some time now...

 

I googled a bit and found some possible fixes with the pro 2 but none for the pro 3 (because it uses a different pen)

 

I have the SP3 i7 and love the crap out of it. I use it for development on the go and doing presentations. The wireless does support wireless AC so it screams if you have a good router. I run AC when I'm close to the router and dual band N when I'm too far away for the 5Ghz AC signal to work.

Only problem I have is that I have the windows phone SDK installed for visual studio which adds some hyperv functionality to support the emulators. Surface has its own sleep profile / power saving mode. Hyperv conflicts with this and makes the wifi act wonky when you wake from sleep so it will say its connected but wont be so you'll need to disconnect and reconnect. Kind of a pain.

 

I've no problems using my surface 3 pro although the pen doesn't work in game. The game when run in the editor is fine and the pen works a treat but build and execute for some reason the pen is not recognised even as a mouse input.

 

Dude please read the forum rules, dont make your first ever post here be a necro to a 5 year old conversation. Especially to post borderline (or actual?) marketing spam.

No-one involved is still talking about this and didnt since 5 years ago...

 

Thanks for the report @GameDevCouple_I. I've deleted the post. Evidence suggests it's manual spam.