KITA

Artists & photographers hopeful but skeptical about prospects of full-scale Photoshop on A...

KITA

July 2018

ericthehalfbee said:

The problem for her is that she wants as much of the software to translate as possible, including keyboard shortcuts.

The reason why the Microsoft Surface (and other Windows "tablets") are horrible to use as tablets is precisely because of this attitude. People are stuck with the idea you need to use keyboard shortcuts (or the same menu structures) as a normal desktop App without trying to imagine different ways of interacting on a touch device.

In her example, she uses Option and Right Click (this seems to be common as people often use Shift, Right Click or Option in combination with other actions in Photoshop).

So why not have the keys she uses the most appear on the screen when she selects a tool to use? They can stay hidden most of the time (keeping your screen clear) and appear only when needed. Further, you don't even need to have the virtual "key" work as a standard key (meaning you press and hold when performing an action - like dragging). You could tap once to turn it on and then tap again to turn it off when finished. So instead of having one hand tied up on your keyboard holding a single key down you can now use that hand for others tasks (gestures with your fingers while also using the stylus).

A well-designed tablet App will have a UI that dynamically changes under your fingers as you use the device. Not being constrained to keeping one hand on a keyboard opens up all sorts of possibilities for interaction.

That's the wrong way to look at it. All you're doing is forcing the use of a touch screen when it's not necessarily the best option, but the only option Apple offers.

Buttons on the stylus and keyboard shortcuts are far quicker in a work flow than having to find on screen buttons with NO tactile feedback.

In the case of a Surface, you can use the Surface Pen (or any other compatible 3rd party active stylus), which has two buttons (side and top) and an eraser. You can also use any wireless accessory or remote, such as these:

Hands on with the new Apple and Blackmagic Thunderbolt 3 eGPU

KITA

July 2018

Mike Wuerthele said:

In reality, it isn't much, if any, of a limitation with the eGPU technology as a whole.

I think that's the area where I disagree with you, or at least on our level of tolerance.

For example, if used for gaming or VR applications, a high end eGPU can see a massive loss in performance due the PCIe 3.0 x4 bottleneck in TB3.

While this won't be the case for every application that uses an eGPU, it certainly outlines a weakness with the technology. I should also mention that the bandwidth will shrink even further if the eGPU is feeding back into the internal display.

At the end of the day, it really depends on what the user's planning on doing, some applications might see very little degradation. I think as we see newer more powerful GPUs, this gap will only grow.

Hands on with the new Apple and Blackmagic Thunderbolt 3 eGPU

KITA

July 2018

Mike Wuerthele said:

KITA said:

The only real advantage I see with that eGPU is the ability to use a TB3 display with it. The low noise is also a plus.

The major downsides are the price, a midrange AMD dGPU and the fact that you can't change the dGPU.

I think if you had more powerful dGPUs, you'd really see the performance degradation from Thunderbolt 3 becoming more of an issue, especially for the 13inch MBP where it has to share bandwidth with other PCH components.

While Max is testing the Blackmagic, I've got most of the rest of the enclosures.

The performance loss versus the card on a native PCI-e x16 connection isn't really any worse with a Vega 56 or 64.

It really depends on what's being tested though. A benchmark, such as Geekbench, won't show degradation in the same way a real world application would.

As for the bottleneck with the 13" MBP:

That DMI has a bandwidth equal to PCIe 3.0 x4 (~4 GB/s). It has to share that bandwidth all of the components on the PCH, including the eGPU. This means that the eGPU is actually going to see further performance degradation in real world use.

Just to remind everyone, this DMI bottleneck isn't the case for the 15" version, only the 13".

Apple refreshes MacBook Pro with six-core processors, 32GB of RAM

KITA

July 2018

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Are any of these new "pro" laptops capable of real VR without an external GPU? I ask because they cost twice as much as Windows laptops that are fully VR capable.

No, from what we understand, the GPUs have remained, for the most part, unchanged (ie. still weaker than a GTX 1050).