Hi everyone,

I recently purchased the Microsoft Surface(newest model released May 2015, $499) Its not the pro version and not the RT version. Moi was the first and only app I have yet installed, so my comments are based off of a very fresh machine.

I purchased it thinking it would allow me to act quickly on my "Moments of Inspiration" but I am finding that performance is rather limited. Moi seems to freeze, or not respond, and there is no telling what will trigger these issues. The file sizes have been very small, just a few solids and curves. The most recent crash was that the model space froze, then disappeared, but Moi itself hadn't crashed as I was able to save my work and close Moi. Another time I got a direct x error, but I was too impatient to read it.

When it does work it is great, the screen size is still large enough to work on the split view, and working on a touchscreen with multi-finger zoom, orbit, pan is spectacular.

My takeaway is that I am going to return the surface and get the pro model, unless anyone has tips on making moi work better.

Hi yakas,

I was tempted to buy one this weekend, with the idea I could eventually use MoI from time to time.
Your experience calm me down.

So thanks for sharing !

Hi yakas - it sounds like video driver related problems. You might see if there is any updated video driver you can get for it, that's probably your best bet for solving the problems. Often times a brand new machine still has slightly outdated driver software on it since they prepared the stuff for it like 6 months or so ago.

Another thing you might try is to go to MoI Options > General > "Edit .ini file" button, and inside the moi.ini file find the line for DisplayThreadLimit= and set it to say:

DisplayThreadLimit=1

That will prevent MoI from using multiple threads in the display engine, some video drivers can be sensitive to that.

Hopefully one of those things will get it to behave better.

- Michael

Michael, I will try out you suggestions and report again on performance/crashes.

I want to mention that the screen on this machine is a bit smaller than the pro model, but it is still plenty of real estate. Also, this model does not come with a pen(which the pro does) all tallied with the type cover, pen and 64gb micro sd I spent $730. I felt cheated by the pen not being included. But again, it is a wonderful experience to have the pen so don't even think of not getting one.

::Update::

Micheal's suggestions were applied, although the video driver was current.

Things have improved.

I opened my largest moi file at 14mb, and it runs well. Navigation is seamless, and common commands work fine except for a little slowdown on zoom/orbit whilst in the line command. I am going to stick with it, I have PS loaded as well and it gets the job done. This surface can handle exactly what I needed it for.

I think the problems I had earlier were caused by my entire cloud account being downloaded in the background. Just before I wrote this post I had another error message displayed in the viewport in moi, and all I caught was,"could not create 3..." then it closed when the model opened.


The model used for testing

Hi yakas, did a new video driver do it, or was just changing the display thread limit enough to fix things?

- Michael

@PaQ Pour tempérer voir ce post dans la section française! ;)
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI_FRANCAIS&msg=433.1

I went the extra yard and got the Pro version , screens a little bigger and It will run any program you throw at it :)
Its just as powerful as my desktop PC:)
MOI 3 , Modo and FormZ pro run on it like a dream , worth the extra $ if you have it to spare :)

Hi Pilou,

The french thread is about the surface pro 3 ... different beast than the surface 3 ;)

sure! ;)