My bad. I'm just used to assuming that any wikia for any show tends to have source material spoilers if the show has any.
Kinda agree with a heads up. Been struggling to dodge all you guy's spoilers while quoting you! XD
My bad. I'm just used to assuming that any wikia for any show tends to have source material spoilers if the show has any.
Unlikely. Even though Wacom is in a partnership with Microsoft to create a universal pen standard, Wacom EMR (and some other technologies) are still considered the de facto standard for art. The Windows Ink Wacom pens we're seeing are all Wacom AES pens which are much easier to make cross compatible with N-Trig's due to both relying on an active stylus and a passive digitizer. While AES/N-Trig don't have parallax and have perfect edge accuracy over EMR, EMR, from what I've been hearing, still has much less problems with jitter, palm rejection (I don't know the specifics but from what I hear, the passive pen digitizers are combined with touch digitizers so there's some processing delay in determining whether a finger or a pen are being used. Might not be true. I don't expect people in the art community to know much but I don't dig into whitepapers either). EMR also has the advantage of passive pens which means the pens can be less expensive to manufacture (despite what prices for pens are nowadays) and smaller (i.e. Staedtler Norris, S-Pen, etc.).
Edit: forgot about the VAIO Z Canvas. Touch digitizers can be turned off without affecting the pen digitizer so N-Trig and Wacom AES technically shouldn't have to discern between finger and pen.
Then there's Apple's own active pen passive digitizer standard which currently just blows N-Trig and AES out of the water.
We'll have to wait a bit longer for AES and N-Trig to become better and then become the weapon of choice for creatives. Wacom EMR's hold is too strong right now. It's a bad technology for mobile devices because, theoretically (and this is probably the case to begin with), EMR consumes way more power than passive digitizer active pen solutions. Active digitizers are always emitting an alternating magnetic field (for power delivery purposes) which draws far more power than an active pen and a passive digitizer. There's only a handful of mobile devices using EMR (Samsung Notebook 9 Pro/Pen, Acer Switch 13 Black Edition, Wacom MobileStudio, Samsung Note phones). It's not hard to see why an active 13-15" diagonal surface will draw far more power than a single pen emitting a field.
Actually never thought about it from that perspective! Wacom really hasn't done anything groundbreaking with their desktop graphics tablet lines in recent...decades, to the point many people in the art community actually don't even bother with following any of the tech in detail and still stick to the over a decade old Intuos2 and Graphire tablets. Never really been impressed by Microsoft's N-Trig digitizers since day one. Recently demoed the Surface Studio at a gaming summit here. The pen still feels like crap.
Early Cintiqs, both the desktop and mobile versions all suffered heavily from parallax issues. Heard many complaints about that with the first gen Surface Pros. Haven't really cared about them since the 3rd gen. However, parallax can easily be adjusted to. Issues with jitter is something you cannot control and will have a negative effect on your strokes, which is a pain to fix. Programs have solutions to try to smoothen out that, and some work extremely well (at the expense of processing power, something early mobile devices really lacked), but it's always better to use them carefully to enhance your strokes, not try to fix them, as aggressive stabilizers tend to cut into deliberate micro movements (and sometimes very large movements too. Some popular programs have stabilizers designed for people drawing with mice, so it also has to overcome things like acceleration and snapping).
Parallax can be used to one's advantage, as it can be an offset to help you see the tip better. What people do is use custom nibs that they make themselves, and they make it longer or shorter than the standard nibs that came with Wacom pens. I know there's that funny article about using spaghetti for nibs but honestly that's a terrible idea. The grinded wheat will go everywhere. People have been using nylon trim wires or toothpicks for ages, especially as Wacom nib shapes are easy to mimick (just a cylinder that tapers to a round end) and they were very expensive. When the Intuos4 came out, Wacom added the new experimental paper texture to the surface. It was more like sand paper. My old Bamboo tablet was from the same time period. Many people complained that half the nib was gone after a painting session. For me, 3 days of very light use shaved my nib's round tip into a flat plane. Wacom quickly fixed that and offered to change the surface of people who bought the Intuos line. Can't remember if it was free or charged, but it was a very big deal and many people were not happy. Anyways, some carefully polished their tablet surface until it was smooth. Others used cheap replacements for nibs. I personally wrapped a paper on top of my tablet and sanded a toothpick to the shape of the nib. That one single nib lasted many many years!
Only ditched it a few months ago. People discovered that the length of the custom nib affected the feel of the tool. Some could make it quite long and drag it like a brush. One person I know had a large Cintiq with a smooth glass surface. He cut his longer than usual (I believe. This was many years ago so memory is fading) with a nylon trim wire after I told him about it, and he rounded the tip by melting it slightly on top of a lighter. He was pretty happy, as the nylon tip didn't give him the annoying plastic-clicking-on-glass feel, and the extra distance increased the parallax effect, so he can see the brush tip in Photoshop without the stylus blocking anything, quite important for line art that requires a very small brush.
Apple's digitizer is honestly amazing. Still can use some polish here and there, but with the power in those tablets and the almost full migration of some very powerfull desktop art applications, they are seriously looking to become mobile workstations for those who just need one or two specific apps.
As for Windows Ink...yeah never used it. General rule of thumb, if you plug in a graphics tablet someday, regardless of where you got it from, download drivers from their site even if it's crap and disable everything related to Windows Ink. Don't know about the newest version of Photoshop CC as there has been major updates recently, but even until a while ago, most people still run their art programs with WinTab, which was what Microsoft had before Windows Ink. No guarantees but usually works very well. Some would even run Photoshop in compatibility mode to get it running. This is only for third party graphics tablets and pen displays, not the newer pens built into mobile devices. No experience with those so I never bothered to look into them.
There is a huge misconception with regards to how much performance you're actually getting from these 6-core mobile processors. Most people don't know (and shouldn't need to know) the specifics on this stuff.
i3-8350K vs. i5-4690K is whatever. Intel just panicked after Ryzen and needed to get something out there. Coffee Lake is actually a piece of **** architecture for the most part because of how rushed it is. Intel took a design optimized for lower core counts and simply slapped on more cores. Zen is actually more power efficient than Coffee Lake from what I remember. Skylake-X i9 chips slapped on more cores in response to Ryzen and you get this monstrous ~200W TDP. Intel was not prepared and didn't have an arch for higher core counts ready.
Despite Intel throwing a lot of shade at AMD for just gluing together a bunch of dies, AMD's modular die approach is much better in terms of efficiency. Intel's traditional method of designing an architecture without scalability is falling off a cliff.
Back to what I don't like about your statement. The U-series CPUs carrying 4 cores are not really all that good. Yes they are way better than before for multicore but despite being advertised of a turbo of 4GHz and having 4 cores, you don't actually get 4 cores at 4 GHz.
You either choose 2 cores at 4 GHz or 4 cores at 2 GHz. There is a lot of fine print attached to turbo this time around as well. Details here:
I mean you don't need more than a 1060 for most work. Devices with a 1060 are already quite thin. Good thermal design should let you have GTX 1060's in 18mm thick laptops.
Raven Ridge APUs (Ryzen + Vega) are quite underpowered. At best we're seeing 11 Vega CUs in the desktop variants which is about as fast as a MX 150 (mobile GT 1030) which, on a gaming basis, can play the more popular titles on medium to high at 1080p 50-60fps. It's enough for very light work but anything beyond that is a no go.
The only chips that are remotely good enough for serious work would be the Coffee Lake G (or is it Kaby Lake G) processors from Intel which have enough Vega CU's to perform either at 1050-1050Ti level or 1060 MaxQ to 1060 level (there's 2 Vega variants here; GL and GH with the former being the less powerful one).
Interesting. I haven't been following coffee lake news until yesterday night so you can say I'm clueless.
I had a feeling this was a response to AMD but still, only started reading up what's up yesterday, and it's mainly to see what's inside the newest 2-in-1's. Thanks for the write-up. Appreciate it!
I mainly posted that section out of personal excitement regarding how things may go in a few years. The main program I use is Photoshop CS6. Others are some 3D program that are quite light if used in optimized workflows. In Photoshop, the only real tool I need is the brush tool and all those that surround it. They are nearly all CPU based, but really only use up to 4 cores. And they really really like high clock speeds.
Say a filter takes 12 seconds to complete. If I shave off 25%, it will be 9 seconds. I will notice it, but I'm already in a mode where I'm waiting, stretching, or sipping my coffee. I don't care about those 3 seconds. Now lets say my processor is struggling with keeping up with the brush, so there is a small lag. This is a common problem with weaker mobile devices that are working with complex brushes. If I shave off 25%, it will feel very responsive, as strokes are done quickly and consistently. Vise versa, if I increase the lag by 33%, it will feel terrible. It's one of those few workflows where when you need it, 2 cores turboing up to 4 ghz temporarily is
extremely appreciated once in a while. 4 cores at lower speeds are acceptable for other stuff when Photoshop isn't chewing up a single core (and all the RAM).
Regarding the 6 core part, I'm not trying to argue. You are completely right. It's just looking up the current CPU lines made me think that Intel is actually doing something (albeit they are probably just reacting to AMD), and the CPU market will finally get interesting. The current gen stuff is set, but in 5 years, mobile workstations might be very interesting for digital painting, even if it is a fairly niched market. For what I do, some 3D renderers take advantage of GPU rendering very well (saw a watercooled 11 Titan XP setup as a dedicated Octane Render setup a while back), but most rely still on the CPU. Seeing higher core counts being brought to the mainstream, especially on portable devices really makes me wonder about how things will be like in a few years. A light device, that can turbo very high on 2 cores when needed but also packaged with a good 6 core design can be pretty nice for Photoshop and a 3D program on the side. Also really excited for AMD's stuff, especially with power efficiency as you mentioned. I guess I kinda got ahead of myself with daydreaming.
While these concepts are interesting, they're almost never going to exist, not even accounting for the fact that it's low volume and too niche. The main problem is the use of a separate drawing surface. That eats up way too much space. You're almost always only going to see pen displays like the MobileStudio, Surface Pro, iPad Pro, etc. People who do prefer their drawing surface separate from their display (people who don't want their hands in the way as they draw) will have to deal with a good laptop w/ a USB drawing tablet. There's also the fact that the user experience is pretty garbage; if the keyboard detection mechanism doesn't work or the keyboard runs out of power (if it's a keyboard that gets power through inductive coupling or something else, then not getting power would fall into the first class of failure) the quality of the experience of interacting with this device drops through the floor. Navigating OSes like macOS or Windows without a keyboard is pretty much a nightmare. There are reasons why you don't ever see people using Surface products without a keyboard for regular use.
Yeah, these things get thrown around a lot for fun. I'm kinda in the concept design industry so people generate random concepts all the time as challenges/fun thought projects that people discuss. Depending on what you do, certain more pragmatic stuff like basic supply and demand concepts are completely ignored as it was never designed to be pitched in the first place. However, it's cool to discuss it as people learn a lot. This guy probably didn't think about how you will use the device without slicing your own wrist. Aside from that, there is literally no market for a device like this. There are so many better solutions when price comes into play.
Here's that setup with a GPD Win. First gen, and supports only 4 gb of RAM but this person modded 8 gb onto it. He says it works perfectly fine and performance feels somewhere between the 3rd and 4th gen Surface Pro for light sketches in Photoshop and ZBrush. The whole thing probably costs a little over 400 USD, excluding the RAM mod. Many other creative DIY hacks exist and the small compromises in not being in a unibody design is perfectly acceptable, or even desired.
Before, I was considering a setup like this, thus a needlessly long self conflict between an XPS 15 or an iPad.
Already have a satchel like that, which slings over my shoulder to provide a stury surface to draw on. Having an iPad will be less versitile and powerful, but it will offer great mobility. I also tend to go to places where I can carry an iPad but not a laptop in a bag, so I was very tempted. A Windows based tablet PC with a small digitizer still makes more sense for most people than the actual product designed. People will want to buy it, of course, but s you mentioned, demand will not be high enough.
But still cool to think about from a product design standpoint, especially as tech for artists is so boring and slow to develop. Any new ideas are nice to dream about.
\(^w^)/
Thanks again for the detailed write-up!
