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New G501 (for those who were waiting for the GX500)

X-ROG
Level 15
559 Views
235 REPLIES 235

J82 wrote:
Great help Cajun! I'll be switching laptops from Sony too from my Vaio SVS. Have a question for you.

When you're set at 1080p, are you having issues with scaling when opening PDFs like adobe or other programs (program boxes appear in windowed format with super small font for example). Or web pages appearing out of sorts?


Well, I am no expert so here I try my best to explain.

The short answer is ... I find 125% scaling on Windows to appear fine on the OS GUI. This percentage is the only number in Windows that affect the issue you are describing. Keeping this percentage close to 100% will help you avoid instances where different programs use different invocations of GUI elements. Therefore, you downsampling the resolution from 4K to 2K divides this percentage by 2 and drastically helps in avoiding this issue on Windows software GUI's. See this for details. From what I hear, some Adobe products are notorious for bypassing WIndows GUI API, so its GUI remains at 100% while everything in the outside world is, say at at much higher percentage.

However, webpages have their own scaling due to years of constant evolution of web standards. Firefox has dpi-aware scaling so web pages appear fine. (Chrome has it too, I think) Webmasters want more traffic so they are incentivized to maintain their webpages to be readable as technology progresses. This evolution is technologically assisted by standards in web page design, and the social-ness of people visiting webpages keeps everything up to date. Therefore this issue is less likely on webpages.

In summary, the issues you are describing is a generic issue, not specific to G501JY :cool:

Great feedback...


On the 4K video, have you tried youtube ? Quite a bit of 4K being put on there recently... I am keen to understand the issue mentioned by that Amazon review re the 960m. If you go to the Nvidia website "4k" is definitely not included in the Product Info section (you need to slect 970m for it to appear) although if you look at the "High Resolution Display Support" under Features it says this:

High Resolution Display Support
Able to drive the industry’s largest and highest resolution displays up to 4K resolution and with support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)3


Confusing...

So, any experience appreciated....

Mandolin wrote:
Great feedback...


On the 4K video, have you tried youtube ? Quite a bit of 4K being put on there recently... I am keen to understand the issue mentioned by that Amazon review re the 960m. If you go to the Nvidia website "4k" is definitely not included in the Product Info section (you need to slect 970m for it to appear) although if you look at the "High Resolution Display Support" under Features it says this:



Confusing...

So, any experience appreciated....


I am still learning so apologies for excessive detail. I downloaded The Dark Knight Rises 2015-04-01 4K trailer and tried playing with 2 software: VLC and K-Lite Standard.

Experiment 1: VLC plain vanilla installation: some occasional framerate stutter, image still visible when renderd

Experiment 2: VLC + go to Simple Preferences -> Input/Codecs -> Hardware-accelerated decoding = Automatic: bad stutter and huge green blocks as if it was not finished rendering

Experiment 3: MPC plain vanilla installation (GPU acceleration is enabled): smooth sailing

In short, you need to enable GPU acceleration for video playback on 4K.

EDIT: Additional note: all video playback was performed on 4K resolution, not 2K.

cajun_azn wrote:
I am still learning so apologies for excessive detail. I downloaded The Dark Knight Rises 2015-04-01 4K trailer and tried playing with 2 software: VLC and K-Lite Standard.

Experiment 1: VLC plain vanilla installation: some occasional framerate stutter, image still visible when renderd

Experiment 2: VLC + go to Simple Preferences -> Input/Codecs -> Hardware-accelerated decoding = Automatic: bad stutter and huge green blocks as if it was not finished rendering

Experiment 3: MPC plain vanilla installation (GPU acceleration is enabled): smooth sailing

In short, you need to enable GPU acceleration for video playback on 4K.

EDIT: Additional note: all video playback was performed on 4K resolution, not 2K.


many thanks for this.

I took in a 4k sample and tried it on MPC...choppy... but when I selected GPU acceleration as to DXVA2 (copyback) fixed the stuttering.

Interestingly, the wmp built into 8.1 works fine too.

BUT, when I tried to play 'tears of steel' which you can download in 4K DCP 4096 x 2160 resolution, MPC HC cannot handle it and the playback stutters severely with random audio. wmp wont play it at all. I guess this one is a challenge for codecs at the moment...

Skjoldur wrote:
The nice thing about UHD is, that it is exactly 4 times FHD, so you will always be able to switch to FHD and it will still look great if you run into any problems. It even displays 1280x720 very well since this is exactly 1/9th of UHD.

I need to work and play on my notebook when I am abroad, so UHD / 4k is perfekt for me, because I need the real estate. The large battery is even more important.

Razer made the dumb move to go for a 3200x1800 and there are virtually no external monitors with that resolution so I would have to readjust all windows after connecting. But then again they did not add a DisplayPort and they decided yet again to not enter the European market, Germany in specific. I would have bought it otherwise even though its runtime is not that great.

This one is my last hope for the moment...


Yes, UHD will look great on 1080p mode. However, there are still some programs that still have dpi scaling issues even after adjusting the resolution on the UHD monitor.

J82 wrote:
Yes, UHD will look great on 1080p mode. However, there are still some programs that still have dpi scaling issues even after adjusting the resolution on the UHD monitor.


How? The actual resolution will be 1080p, the rest is done by the display. Are you sure you don't mean one of those fake resolutions like MBPr uses for 1080p on retina displays?

Skjoldur wrote:
How? The actual resolution will be 1080p, the rest is done by the display. Are you sure you don't mean one of those fake resolutions like MBPr uses for 1080p on retina displays?


This is what I meant

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7939/scaling-windows-the-dpi-arms-race/4

J82 wrote:
This is what I meant

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7939/scaling-windows-the-dpi-arms-race/4


But in this case they did not change the resolution, so of course they run into the scaling problems. I just said that you can reduce the resolution from UHD to FHD without the usual interpolation issues if need be. There will be no scaling.

Skjoldur wrote:
But in this case they did not change the resolution, so of course they run into the scaling problems. I just said that you can reduce the resolution from UHD to FHD without the usual interpolation issues if need be. There will be no scaling.


Ahh, gotcha.

I guess another thing we could do is get the FHD version , swap out the HD with a SSD (voiding the warranty), and see if we can buy an additional 96 watt battery to replace the one already in the case (not sure if this is possible, anyone?).

drntropy wrote:
Hi Marshall,

First time poster, long time reader. I was wondering when Newegg's exclusivity agreement will end? I don't see anyone else selling the laptop right now and I do not wish to buy it from them. Thanks.


Weird, it was listed on hidevolution and xoticpc.com for awhile and they both disappeared. Wonder if they got ticked about the exclusive launch. Kind of a screw job to other retailers and customers that don't want to use newegg.