Surface Laptop 7: Sunday Drivers

Following up my first impressions article, I spent all day yesterday further setting up and using the Surface Laptop 7. It’s a gorgeous laptop and a worthy alternative to the MacBook Air in look and feel, at least. And while it’s far too soon to weigh in on the performance and battery life, there are some interesting comparisons to be had, both with the Air and the other Snapdragon X-based laptop I have in-house, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14.

I very much prefer the larger size of the Surface Laptop 7 display, in keeping with the shift I saw last year to larger, 16:10 panels in each laptop size range. Of course, Surface utilizes an even squarer 3:2 aspect ratio, which makes sense for tablets but is unusual for laptops. I like it: I tend to work in one app at a time and since writing and reading are my primary activities, this display makes sense to me. Those with side-by-side app needs might find each of those windows a bit scrunched.

The display doesn’t lie flat. In fact, it doesn’t go back very far at all, which is fine for most use cases but could make for a frustrating flight in a cramped coach seat. Oddly, Surface Laptop doesn’t support Windows 11’s terrific presence sensing functionality, which works in tandem with Windows Hello facial recognition to make authentication instantaneously fast. (The Yoga Slim does support this feature.) The display comes on immediately when I open the display lid, which I love, but if it’s asleep with the display lid open, it won’t know you’re approaching, and you have to tap a key or the touchpad to wake it up. Related to this, I prefer explicitly signing in, so this isn’t a big deal for me personally. I do wish it had a fingerprint reader too.

Aesthetically, I like the clean look of the Surface Laptop for the same reasons I like the minimalistic MacBook Air. There are no speaker grills, stickers, or logos interrupting the design, as I expect from a premium device (but rarely get aside from Apple). It’s difficult to innovate with such a common, well-known form factor, and so Microsoft has instead just done the right thing, dispensed with the Alcantara, and let Surface Laptop be what it is.

I find myself compulsively picking up the laptop and putting it next to my ear so I can tell whether there’s any fan noise. So far, fan noise has ranged from non-existent (silent) to noticeable but non-objectionable, in the latter case only while playing games. It never seems to get very hot, regardless, and once a game quits, it quickly reverts to its normal silent behavior.

Speaking of which, the Surface Laptop I ordered arrived with a slight processor upgrade over the Yoga Slim: Where the Lenovo laptop has a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, the lowest-end X Elite, the Surface Laptop features an X1E-80-100, which is the next chip up in the current four-model range. I’m not sure whether I could even notice a difference between the two, as they’re very similar, with 12 processor cores, 42 MB of cache, a clock speed of 3.4 GHz, a 3.8 TFLOPS iGPU, and a 45 TOPS NPU. The only difference is that the X1E-80-100 in the Surface supports dual-core boost to 4 GHz, where the X1E-78-100 does not. My Surface Laptop also has more RAM (32 GB vs. 16 GB) and more storage (1 TB vs. 512 GB) than the Yoga.

I’ll try some video encoding comparisons later today–there’s an Arm64 native version of Handbrake–but meanwhile, I did have some games to try.

I installed three games—Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, and Borderlands 3—on Saturday night. The latter two are new to me on Snapdragon thanks to a Steam Summer Sale. (And since someone asked about this in Ask Paul this past Friday, I emailed Steam to see if they would refund me the $20 I had paid for Doom a few days before its sale and then repurchased it at the $4 sale price when they did so. Why not?)

I had been playing Doom on the Yoga Slim, so I picked up where I left off, and this afforded an excellent, seamless experience with high-quality graphics and terrific performance, despite Auto SR being disabled. In fact, I ended up playing it for over two hours on Sunday, and I was getting quite happy with it. And then this happened.

And now it won’t work: It crashes this same way every time I play the game. So I loaded up Doom on the Yoga Slim to see whether the same issue occurred … and it did. I guess there’s something odd about this point in the game and the emulation. I’m going to play through a level or two on a different (x64) PC and see if I can get by that. (Update: I installed the game and brought it up without issue. I’ll see if getting to a new checkpoint fixes it on Arm.)

Doom Eternal was even less successful at first: Despite tweaking the in-game and Auto SR settings in many different configurations, it would either run in that strange full-screen “window” up in the left corner of the desktop or would run full-screen at horribly low resolution and with blurry, barely discernible graphics, oftentimes with sprites that were blown out into weird pulsating 3D spiky shapes.

I had chosen the Doom games because I like them and wanted something with a single-player experience. But I went with Borderland 3 because it’s one of the 15 or so initial launch titles that’s supposed to just work automatically on Snapdragon X-based PCs. I don’t believe I’d ever played a Borderland game per se, beyond taking a quick peek, but I’ve always like the pen and ink cartoon-style graphics.

This was perhaps the most seamless gaming experience yet: Full-screen, native aspect ratio, great visual quality and terrific frame rates: 60 to 70 FPS in the slower sequences are roughly 40 FPS or better during action sequences.

Late Friday, Qualcomm sent laptop reviewers an updated version of the Adreno graphics driver that will soon go out to Copilot+ PC buyers via Windows Update. This new driver version improves performance, gameplay, compatibility, and system experiences, Qualcomm says, and it enables full support for several more games—Cyberpunk, Doom Eternal, Far Cry 5, and a few others—and smoother gameplay in Overwatch 2, Counter-Strike 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and some other titles. Apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Lightroom should also see better stability and performance, and many apps will experience improved launch times.

You will note that Doom Eternal is on that list. I had installed the new driver on the Yoga Slim before flying home. But this morning, I installed it on the Surface Laptop, hoping for the best. The first time I ran it, Doom Eternal appeared in that terrible little windowed space on the desktop. But the second time … voilà! It just worked, and full-screen at 3:2 and a decent resolution. Nice.

I didn’t just play games on Sunday, of course. I also installed more of my apps, making one change based on a Twitter recommendation: There’s a native Arm64 port of Greenshot, the screenshot app I like, on GitHub, and so I gave that a go: I wasn’t having issues with the normal x64 version, but the theory is that native apps will provide better performance and battery life, so what the heck. It works normally.

As I did on the Yoga, I configured Git so that I could update each of my current books—the Windows 11 Guide, Windows Everywhere, and Eternal Spring—and I spent at least two hours yesterday working on a new chapter for the Windows 11 Field Guide that is tentatively titled AI Apps and Experiences and will document all the AI experiences in Windows 11 that aren’t covered elsewhere in the book (like Copilot or certain app features). This includes features that require an AI PC or a Copilot+ PC. I do that work in Visual Studio Code, which is available natively on Arm, and had no issues at all.

Indeed, that’s basically been the theme over these first few days. Aside from gaming—which, to be fair, is a miracle in that it works at all—everything has just worked normally. This ties to something I wrote seven long years ago, about Windows 10 on Arm at the time: If this platform works properly, it will just be boring. And aside from being hyper-aware at all times and actively scanning for issues, it’s been drama-free. I’m home now, so I have access to more hardware devices, including two HP all-in-one printers, so I wondered if I could perhaps I drum up some drama there. But that worked fine, too, at least with the one I tried: It connected immediately, and I printed out the first page of this overview document ssuccessfully.

Speaking of which, someone asked whether the USB4 Type-C ports in the Surface Laptop are really 40 Gbps. I believe they are—Snapdragon X does support 40 Gbps over USB4/Type-C—but this information just isn’t out there. (It’s notable that none of the 4 or 5 reviews of Surface Laptop 7 even mention this important data-point.) I will keep trying, and if all else fails, I’ll grab a 40 Gbps USB4 drive enclosure and a modern M.2 SSD and measure it myself. But I will ask Qualcomm and Microsoft first, of course.

More soon.