2015 Blade QHD - some questions

Hi Everyone,

I've had this laptop for about 3 weeks now, and on the whole it's a great piece of kit. I do have a few questions though. Recently I posted these questions to the Razer insider forums, but for unknown reasons the post was deleted. After poking around on r/razer on Reddit, I read that this is a thing Razer does, and they seem to censor/remove any posts that could potentially look negative on Razer.

OK, so the integrated panel. By default, 3d games don't scale to the size of the display unless you set the games to the native resolution of the panel in use (3200x1800 and 4K in my case). The only workaround to get proper scaling is apparently to disable the touchscreen via the device manager. While this is easy enough to do, and I certainly don't mind doing it, I was wondering if anyone has a workaround or solution that would allow me to keep the touchscreen functionality enabled while still allow games running at lower resolutions to scale to the size of the display. I'm also curious as to why the touchscreen functionality being enabled would also cause the same behavior on my 4k TV? I'm sure it has something to do with NVIDIA Optimus technology, but i'm certainly no expert.

Another issue (though I doubt there's going to be any solutions to this): it appears that the HDMI port doesn't support HDMI 2.0, and sadly no displayport options are available. It's a shame too, I play a lot of Diablo 3, and even at the integrated panel's native resolution I get 60fps most of the time. But hooking it up to my 50" 4k HDTV means i'm limited to 30fps because of the older-rev'd HDMI port included...

Minor annoyance: Sometimes when switching from the integrated display to HDMI, sound gets lost. A reboot fixes it, but it's annoying regardless. Anyone ever run into this? It's probably another little bug with Optimus, but again, I'm no expert.

Also, for those of you who require bitlocker or rdp functionality on your Blade, the FAQ on Razer's website states that you need to do a clean install of Windows 8.1 Pro in order to get those - and that you'd lose the ability to use their built-in recovery mechanism (F9). This is completely false. While it is true that you cannot upgrade to 8.1 Pro via the "My Computer" page (unless you have access to an OEM/non-retail key), you *CAN* do it via the control panel. If you do a charms search for "Add Features", you can do it via that mechanism. I was able to upgrade my default Win8.1 Standard OEM install on the blade to the 8.1 Pro (retail) key this way, and lost nothing in the process. The only caveat is that if you do choose to use the recovery functionality via F9, you'll have to re-do the "Add Features" process and re-activate, etc.

Thanks folks!
-K

 

Have you updated the intel display drivers? Even if you have, check the driver version number and match it up with the recent release, there was a post here not too long ago where someone mentioned that they updated the intel drivers but noticed afterwards that it didn't stick.

 

Yeah, they're at the latest rev. I don't think it's the Intel drivers that are the culprit though, i really think it has something to do with Nvidia's optimus.

Case in point, if you have a laptop that has ONLY Intel GMA graphics, the problem doesn't happen because the intel drivers stay in control. That's not the case with laptops that have both onboard and discrete GPU's, since Optimus comes into play.

I don't think this is a problem unique to the Razer. I'm sure other touch-screen laptops that offer both Intel GMA and NVIDIA GPU's probably suffer from this.

Either way, I can totally live with it. What I really wish I wasn't stuck with is 30hz@4k. I'm kind of baffled as to why Razer wouldn't include Displayport so 4k wasn't so limited in framerate. Sure, one could make the argument that modern games will never reach those framerates on a 970M, but many will...

 

It's an Intel driver problem, not Optimus. If you check a few threads there's an easy fix. Just switch your desktop to 1920x1080 and change the scaling option in the Intel properties. The Intel driver handles the drawing of the images to the screen. The processing is offloaded to the 970M though.

 

I've noticed the sound issue when connecting to my TV through HDMI. It doesn't occur 100% of the time for me though, and also disconnecting the cable and re-connecting it to my computer always fixes it. No restart required. Maybe try that?

Also curious about the touchscreen - game scaling thing. Wonder if that will do any good - kind of far fetched to me.