Topaz Studio and Microsoft Surface

I noticed that @jack had reported some crashes when using Topaz Studio on the Microsoft Surface 4. Have other users had good or bad experiences with the Topaz Studio on the Microsoft surface? I am curious about the touch interface and pen use.

Apparently the latest Windows graphics drivers break Topaz products on the Surface Pro. It is essentially due to limited onboard memory in its GPU.

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Thanks for the feedback, @jack

I winder if it will be better on the Surface Pro 6

I am decidedly disappointed with the performance of all Topaz Studio products, including AI Gigapixel, as well as the Topaz Impression 2 plug-in, which won’t install, on my new Microsoft Surface Pro 4 computer. As an aside, I bought the Surface Pro 4 to replace a ten-year-old laptop that ran ALL the Topaz Labs products, albeit a bit slowly. But, at least they all ran without the constant crashes and painfully slow performance regularly experienced on the Surface Pro, which by the way has: 1) a newer and faster processor, 2) about the same amount RAM available to the product, and 3) faster and more powerful GPU with more RAM than my old laptop. The pen, wheel, and touch interface did seemed to work, but is really had to judge because Topaz Studio was constantly crashing before I decided to remove all Topaz Labs products from my Surface Pro 4!

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Iris 540 Graphics on the Surface Pro are not the best for the AI range of Topazlabs products, but will work using CPU (not GPU) mode. Topaz Studio will work if you rollback your drivers to one signed December 2017, but this may cause other software not to work.

Here is a link to December 2017 Windows Update Drivers - you can try rolling back.

https://downloadmirror.intel.com/27360/a08/win64_15.45.23.4860.zip

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The biggest issue with light UHD computers is that they are not designed to run graphics intensive applications that process images in virtual spaces. The Surface Pro 6 uses a Intel UHD Graphics 620 (i7) on a UHD screen.

Even on my PC using the Intel HD 630 (more powerful than the 620) it is painfully slow. Part of the limitations of the Intel architecture is that it has to share RAM for GPU processing.

It is always advisable to choose a system configuration that suites the purpose you wish to use it for. For example, only talking about NVIDIA cards, GeForce cards are intended to render virtual spaces quickly. And the Quadro cards aren’t great for rendering virtual spaces, but the GeForce cards aren’t great for CAD.

The same is true of the Intel series or AMD integrated GPU’s as you need, in my opinion, at least 16GB of RAM for any integrated GPU.

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The other thing I forgot to mention is that the HUAWEI MateBook X Pro is a beautifully specced UHD notebook.

Thank you @Torcello for the information that may be valuable to other Surface Pro users… However, as I already stated, ALL Topaz Studio products were removed from my Surface Pro.

In my not so humble and highly personal opinion, one should NEVER have to roll back drivers or OS updates to make another vendor’s product work on any hardware device.

The Intel integrated GPUs only have 24 execution units and use RAM from the system as they don’t have dedicated vRAM.

I thank you @AiDon, for posting this information for other users who may be considering a Surface Pro purchase. However and in addition to your other replies in this discussion, I personally find your information irrelevant and immaterial to my personal situation because, as stated, I’ve already made a decision to uninstall Topaz Studio on my Surface Pro.

Thank you to @Torcello, @AiDon and @JennZ for sharing their knowledge and experience.

I was intrigued by the idea of a touch surface computer, but it looks like the Microsoft Surface is not ready for Topaz at all.

At least Topaz is still running great on my macs!

@KenKv

II believe the Microsoft Surface Book and recently announced Surface Book 2, both of which may be configured with nVidia discrete graphics, should be capable of running Topaz Studio and other GPU-intensive products. The Microsoft Studio and recently announced Studio 2 may also be configured with a discrete graphics card, but that option is not available for the recently announced Surface Pro 6.

You will probably spend somewhere between $2,500 and $5,000 (USD) to get a Microsoft Surface product with discrete graphics. This is why I decided to go with a Surface Pro 4, which was purchased to replace a more-than-ten-year-old laptop. The Surface Pro 4 more than adequately runs the newest versions of the Adobe Photographic suite of products, Serif Software’s Affinity products (Photo, Designer, and Publisher, which is now in public beta), the Topaz Labs plugins (with the exception of ReMask 5), all my current DxO products, and all my other image processing products including any add-ons and plugins for these products (with exception of Topaz Studio).

I am glad that all of those programs are running well for you. The surface 6 is just coming out, so I will see if the performance is better, since I am not in a hurry to buy a new machine.

I am just appalled at the startling ‘throughput’ on technology to keep up with the software changes :frowning:

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Hi @JennZ,

My new Surface pro 7 also has a problem with Denoise Ai.
After I tried to find out a root cause bt myself, finally, a ble to solve an issue by created a new color profile because I found built-it color profile (Enchanced and sRGB) is a root cause.

So I would like to share this informarion to you in case you still using Surface pro.

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I am still using my Surface Pro 4 and using all my photo editing tools EXCEPT for Topaz products, which still perform poorly. I hope others find the solution to your problem useful. Thanks for sharing it.

I’m very interested in your solution. I can install Denoise AI but it will not run.