System: Microsoft Surface Pro

[Hompf]

Hi there,
what's your guess or in the best case experience with having dolphin running on a Microsoft Surface Pro?
Which games would run smoothly? Would especially Red Steel 2 or the newest Zelda - well, games supporting or require MotionPlus... - work alright?
Greetings

[Anti-Ultimate]

If you want to use your surface as a grill, why not

[admin89]

Quote: what's your guess or in the best case experience with having dolphin running on a Microsoft Surface Pro?

Very poor performance ...
Ultra low voltage CPU such as i5 3317U is really slow for most games

Quote:Red Steel 2 and the newest Zelda

are out of the question . Both of them are very demanding

[Anti-Ultimate]

It will get very hot since it's passive cooled

[MayImilae]

Quote:It will get very hot since it's passive cooled

The pro is not passively cooled, which is why it is slightly thicker than standard Surface. But it will still get really hot regardless, cause the fan(s) are puny and have only tiny slits for vents.

[Hompf]

Well, thanks guys for your answers...
guess I will have to give it a try anyway, cause I wanna have a hybrid-pc-tablet running win8 with pen.

Any suggestions from a Microsoft Surface Pro owner would be still really interesting!

[Starscream]

(04-15-2013, 04:51 AM)Hompf Wrote: Well, thanks guys for your answers...
guess I will have to give it a try anyway, cause I wanna have a hybrid-pc-tablet running win8 with pen.

It's going to be a waste of money if you're expecting any games to work properly on that machine.

(04-15-2013, 04:51 AM)Hompf Wrote: Any suggestions from a Microsoft Surface Pro owner would be still really interesting!

You're free to wait for someone who actually owns one of these to tell you that this is not a gaming machine and that there aren't any games that are going to run at full speed, but you can rest assured that the people who have already commented here do know what they're talking about.

[Scootaloo]

Starscream: agreed. The Surface and other tablets are not meant for stressful emulators like Dolphin. They are meant for Angry Birds. Seriously though unless you're planning on cooking omelets on your new tablet then I strongly dis-advise you trying to run Dolphin on it.

[NaturalViolence]

Really guys? He asked a simple serious question. And a lot of you just responded with jokes about heat and "lol tablets".

So I guess I'll be the guy to objectively analyze this. Despite the fact that most tablets do have low end hardware and are only meant to run basic applications the surface pro has hardware that is extremely close to that of a typical laptop (and in some areas higher). It was an attempt to develop a tablet that can also run productivity applications (consumer desktop/laptop) reasonably well. Obviously it's not perfect and the pricetag to achieve this is pretty enormous.

Reviews can confirm that it does not overheat even when under stress. Its cooling is adequate for the measily 17w TDP CPU that it has. It will be hot to the touch but that doesn't mean the CPU is overheating since cpus can get pretty damn hot. Its TDP is equivalent to a netbook so its not like it can put out enoough heat to give you severe burns or anything like some of the people here are suggesting.

It has a dual core ivy bridge cpu that has a base core clock rate of 1.7GHz. It can turbo up to 2.4GHz in dual threaded workloads like dolphin and 2.6GHz in single threaded workloads. And yes it does work: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-review/6

This means it would effectively be equivalent to a core 2 duo running at 3.6GHz in dolphin. Or a core i3 nehalem running at 3.0 GHz. Or a modern day midrange Intel laptop.

On the GPU side is has an Intel HD 4000. At minimum settings as many of you know the HD 4000 is still not strong enough to run a lot of games at fullspeed. However a lot of games will run at fullspeed on this thing. Not the heavier ones obviously. Super mario galaxy and metroid prime games for example are without question out of the picture. But something like Wind Waker or even Twilight Princess in most areas should run fine.

I don't know how demanding Red Steel is but Skyward Sword is definitely not going to run well.

[Hompf]

Awesome answer, at all points - thanks a lot! (where to rate? )