Here is Microsoft's subtle hint to the Surface Book's secret GPU
Something occurred to us when taking a quick look at the tech specs provided by Microsoft for the newly announced Surface Book.
The Surface Book, as listed on Microsoft’s website, comes in three different configurations, starting from the entry level option, powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, features an Intel HD Graphics 520 GPU, followed by two other higher-end configurations, respectively powered by the Intel Core i5 and i7 CPU, featuring an “nVidia Graphics Processor”. Which one, you say? Good question.
This is what sparked our curiosity to find out, which lead us to follow one subtle hint from last week’s Microsoft Windows 10 Devices event in New York.
According to what we know about the relationship between Microsoft and nVidia, the Surface Book has quite a selection of GPUs available, including several discrete chipsets, fitting different applications.
We must remember that the Surface Book was introduced as a laptop that is very much geared towards graphically-intensive production tasks, which suggests a CAD-class GPU optimized for rendering, real-time modeling applications and image processing.
The type of GPU required by these tasks can often differ greatly from the kind of GPU required for gaming, and yet, when unveiling the Surface Book to the world, Microsoft’s Panos Panay clearly stated that “this [GPU] is for the gamer who plays League Of Legends; this is for the architect who is building a building right now; this is for the scientist who is thinking about a cure for cancer.”.
What’s interesting about this is that all we know so far about Microsoft’s choice to power the Surface Book’s graphic processing is an nVidia GPU with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM, which could mean any number of GTX GPUs, up to the desktop -class GTX 950.
With particular reference to the GTX 950, League Of Legends was incidentally the game used to introduce the new entry-level card, which was capable of running the game at over 60 frames per second, at a resolution of 1980 x 1080 pixels, which is really not too shabby for an entry-level product.
If the hint is anywhere near accurate, the Surface Book could turn out to be quite a bit more impressive a machine than we initially thought.