14 DAY TRIAL // Back on October 6, when Microsoft officially introduced the new Surface Book, which the company calls the ultimate laptop, Panos Panay, the man in charge of the devices unit, cited some internal benchmarks to claim that the new notebook was twice as fast as the MacBook Pro.
When asked about these benchmarks, Microsoft didn't provide any details, saying only that they were performed internally and the Surface Book was indeed faster than the Apple rival.
But according to some new benchmarks performed by PCWorld, the difference between the two devices not only that is not that big, but in some cases, it's even the other way around.
Surface Book vs. 13-inch MacBook Pro
First and foremost, the CPU benchmarks returned some unexpected results: the MacBook Pro was actually a little bit faster than the Surface Book, and the very same outcome was achieved when running Geek Bench 3 tests, which are being used to replicate real-life usage.
As you can see in the chart below, the Surface Book Core i5-6300U with NVIDIA GeForce graphics was the one put against the MacBook Pro 13 2015 with Core i5-5257 and Iris 6100 graphics, and the latter performed slightly better.
Obviously, the NVIDIA graphics card helped the Surface Book perform a lot better in tests where dedicated GPU could make a difference, such as the LuxMark 3 OpenCL Performance LuxBall series of tests. The Surface Book offered significantly improved performance, but this is somewhat to be expected, given the fact that it has additional graphics processing power.
And the very same thing was obtained when playing games, again with the NVIDIA graphics offering a much smoother performance than the integrated chip on the MacBook. The source says the results were even better than Microsoft's claims, with the MacBook achieving 23.6 FPS on the said configuration, while the Surface Book topped at 74 FPS.
Obviously, the Surface Book is faster than the MacBook Pro in those tests where the GPU matters, but otherwise, the difference doesn't seem to be that big. Microsoft is yet to comment on these benchmarks, but we've reached out to the company for a statement and will update should we get an answer.
Update: We've just received a statement from a Microsoft spokesperson telling us that "our validated performance claims are for the Microsoft Surface Book with an Intel Core i7 with 16GB RAM and custom discrete Nvidia GeForce GPU against the MacBook Pro 13-inch with Retina display with an Intel Core i7 with 16GB RAM. We used third-party benchmarks to test the best available Surface Book against the best available 13-inch MacBook Pro."
As you can see, the company put the top-of-the-range Surface Book against the best MacBook Pro model, both coming with Intel Core i7 processor and dedicated graphics, so these third-party benchmarks aren't so relevant in this case.
There's still no word on the used benchmark software or the results the Surface Book or the MacBook Pro achieved
