Some Thoughts About Surface Book 2 and Gaming (Premium)

Microsoft has always promoted performance as a key reason to choose Surface Book. But previous generation devices, even Surface Book with Performance Base, fell short of what one might expect of a real gaming PC. Does Surface Book 2 finally deliver on this promise?

Brad has the answer, at least from the perspective of his 15-inch review unit. Here, I'd like to discuss how Microsoft got to this point. And whether the firm has finally come through on its Surface Book performance promises.

As you probably know, Surface Book has always shipped with powerful Intel Core i5 and i7 mobile processors. So this question largely rests on the quality of its graphics hardware. And that hardware has evolved from anemic to capable over the past few releases.

Announced in October 2015 the first-generation Book was billed as "the ultimate laptop." It shipped with 6th generation Intel Core processors---was, with Surface Pro 4, the first PC to do so---and could be configured with up to 16 GB of RAM and (eventually) 1 TB of solid-state storage.

Aside from the design, which is still rightfully controversial, the most confusing thing about this device was that higher-end models could be configured with an unnamed and poorly-described NVIDIA GeForce discrete graphics processing unit, or dGPU.

During the product introduction, Microsoft's Panos Panay said that Surface Book was essentially the combination of Surface portability with Xbox graphics performance.

And, sorry, but that was patently untrue. That no-name NVIDIA GeForce dGPU turned out to be a variant of a low-end---and, even for 2015, out of date---NVIDIA GeForce 940M with 1 GB of dedicated RAM. As I noted in my review, a Surface Book with that dGPU did significantly outperform those without in 3D and other graphics-heavy applications. But it was no gaming PC.

A year later, Microsoft released a new Surface Book model called Surface Book with Performance Base. This device was essentially identical to previous Books, but it featured a raised keyboard to accommodate more battery and, more important, a vastly improved NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M GPU with 2 GB of RAM, plus a new system for cooling it all.

According to Mr. Panay, Surface Book with Performance Base provided "two times more graphics" than its predecessor, "doubling the performance." And in my examination of its gaming prowess, and in my review of Surface Book with Performance Base, I wrote that new device was, indeed, must better than the first GPU-based Surface Book.

And it could game. Sort of.

"Compared side-by-side with a beefier gaming laptop, the dGPU in Performance Base shows its age," I wrote. "This isn't really a gaming rig, of course, and it cannot handle 4K resolutions at all: The performance of this device at such resolutions was about 1/10th that needed to meet the requirements of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, for example." My recommendation was that gamers look to real gaming laptops.

So what about Surface Book...