Slashdot Mirror
Dell Brings 4K InfinityEdge Display To XPS 15 Line, GeForce GPU, Under 4 Pounds (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: There's no doubt that Dell's new XPS 13 notebook, when it debuted earlier this year, was very well received. Dell managed to cram a 13.3-inch 3200x1800 QHD+ display into a 12-inch carbon fiber composite frame. Dell has now brought that same InfinityEdge display technology to its larger XPS 15, which the company boasts has the same footprint as a 14-inch notebook. But Dell didn't just stay the course with the QHD+ resolution from the smaller XPS 13; the company instead is offering an optional UltraSharp 4K Ultra HD panel with 8 million pixels and 282 pixels per inch (PPI). The 350-nit display allows for 170-degree viewing angles and has 100 percent minimum Adobe RGB color. Dell also beefed up the XPS 15's internals, giving it sixth generation Intel Core processors (Skylake), support for up to 16GB of memory and storage options that top out with a 1TB SSD. Graphics duties are handled by either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a powerful GeForce GTX 960M processor that is paired with 2GB GDDR5 memory. And all of this squeaks in at under 4 pounds.
This is an incredible achievement. That's like 6 USD! Where do I sign up?
Isn't this story supposed to be a different color on the front page?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
thanks for my new password.
All it needs is a TrackPoint instead of a touch pad/screen and I'll have found my next laptop. A matte screen would be nice-to-have. Lenovo machines are not going in the right direction....
Maybe not with Intel graphics. But, if Dell's previous problems with mating NV graphics are anything to go on, this machine, while looking pretty and sporting phenomenal stats, will probably also have massive thermal issues resulting in instant system shutdowns.
As sexy as this sucker is, I'd prefer not to be the guinea pig.
Still, 10 hours of battery life? SEXAH! Oh no! A display with a ridiculous resolution doesn't give me 17 hours of battery life! DARN!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What "either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a powerful GeForce GTX 960M" means is that the nVidia driver will make regular windows, and apps like Firefox/Chrome use the slow Intel card for all your regular stuff. Google maps or anything that uses WebGL will slow to a crawl. Only games are "allowed" to run on the real GPU.
At least, that's how the last laptop I got a year ago with a setup like that worked...
I have a Core i7-4500U, 16GB RAM, and a GT735M, and it is absolutely painful to use certain things like Google Maps.
Morphing Software
Windows DPI scaling still sucks at non-integer multiples. 3840x2160 means you can run 1920x1080 @ 2x, while 3200x1800 and 2560x1440 mean you have to have things unreasonably small at 1x, annoyingly large at 2x, or blurry somewhere in between.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The best laptop screen resolution ever is 1920x1200.
Of course 3840x2400 would also be accepted :)
It's all about the ratio: 16:10.
Excellent for real work - not just video!
and then it will be a *real* beast.
The XPS 9530 is my main machine (predecessor to this update) which also runs a 3200x1800 IGZO display.
So it seems the main change is making the bezel smaller. Meh.
The great thing about these latest XPS's, is the high res display and support for external 4k displays. It was sad the PC industry got stuck for 10 years 1920 x 1200 ( then 1920 x 1080); and it was only the tablet/phone industry that dragged them into the high res age.
I do a lot of CAD and some programming, and have a 4k 27" sitting above the dell 15" are able to use both displays at 100% scaling with no problems.
It's a great productivity improver; if your eyes are good enough. I find a lot of people who look at my displays say they couldn't deal with the text size.
The one thing I dislike about the XPS15, is a lack of native Ethernet port and it uses a different size power plug to what dell have used over the last 10 years.
46137
A laptop you can do real work on, with a display aspect ratio that's only meant for watching movies.
Bring back 4:3, make it 3:2 or - hey, how about 1.41:1 to match ISO 216/DIN476 sizing (and just call it an even 5k at 16:11.33)?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In fairness to Windows, non-integer multiple resizing simply isn't possible to do well unless all your graphics are vector(and even then, the designer's care and attention can have a strong influence on whether the result actually looks good to people at different scales; but at least there is a mathematically 'correct' answer).
If you have bitmap elements, integer-multiple resizing is both relatively trivial and possible to do 'correctly'. Non-integer multiple, like lossy compression, can be done in surprisingly non-annoying ways; but it cannot be done without some violence to the original. Bicubic interpolation will look a whole hell of a lot better than nearest-neighbor; but there simply is no 'correct' way of mapping N pixels into some non-integer multiple of N pixels.
Windows tends to work even less well than the ideal case would suggest; but even if you completely discard all issues of legacy widget sets, horrible retro UI designs, etc. and sit down with a bitmap image in photoshop, resizing it by a non-integer multiple is going to be a matter of compromise.