That’s a very important distinction, because the MacBook Pro 15 is a different class of laptop. The company specifically means the MacBook Pro 13 inch model. Whether you have the Mac Mini or the latest MacBook Pro.First, let’s clarify what Microsoft meant when it said the Surface Book would smoke the MacBook Pro. Steam games are pretty cheap in my country so I have a lot of games in my steam gallery such as Fallout 3,4,New Vegas, Red dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, Sid Meiers Civ 6, Assassins Creed Syndicate, GRID 2019, Dirt 4, Dirt Rally 2.0, Hell Blade Senuas Sacrifice.As a bonus, these drives are also built to be light, portable, and rugged so you can take them anywhere. Im a Mac Gaming Enthusiast and i primarily game on my bootcamp partition on my macbook pro 16 5300M.Microsoft even compares the two directly in its reviewers guide. So the target for the Surface Book is the MacBook Pro 13. It would be like Apple saying the MacBook Pro 15 outperforms, oh, an MSI GT 80 Titan SLI laptop in gaming. For Microsoft to say the Surface Book out performed the MacBook Pro 15 would be absurd.
For my tests, I had access to a 2015 MacBook Pro 13. Here are the latest 2020 M1 MacBook Pro Deals (RRP: 1,299. When the games are there the cost of gaming on a Mac will come down again and we will recommend the M1 MacBook Pro or the 24in iMac. Apple A Grade Macbook Pro 13.3-inch (Retina) 2.9Ghz Dual Core i5 (Early 2015) MF841LL/A 256GB SSD 8 GB Memory 2560x1600 Display Mac OS X v10.12 Sierra Power. Neat.So for the record, I tested a Retina MacBook Pro 13 with an Intel Broadwell Core i5-5752U, Iris 6100 graphics, 8GB of RAM and PCIe SSD, and the latest El Capitan build. I just plugged the Clipboard section with the Core i5 into the base with the graphics chip in it. Microsoft is still pretty secretive about the GPU in the Surface Books, but I don’t believe it’s putting a different GPU in the higher-end models. Microsoft had also provided a Core i5 Surface Book without discrete graphics. Download powerpoint app for macThat’s a huge thermal and power difference. Skylake is a 15-watt chip going up against a 28-watt chip. Let’s just agree that on the vast majority of CPU-bound tasks, the Core i5 MacBook Pro is probably going to be a smidge faster than the Core i5 Surface Book.I’d generally rule it a tie in CPU performance, though, and this is why. OpenCL stands for Open Compute Language, and it’s an attempt to move general purpose CPU chores onto the GPU.For my test I ran the LuxBall load because other workloads crashed on the MacBook Pro 13. It’s a test designed to measure the OpenCL performance of a chip. You can see what a difference it makes in GPU-intensive benchmarks.First up is LuxMark 3. Was Microsoft fibbing!?If you’re thinking Microsoft’s mouth was writing checks its hardware couldn’t cash, take a step back. Microsoft has never told me exactly what tests it used to determine the “twice” boost (believe me, I asked), but I always suspected it was mainly built around the GeForce chip.Of the many ground-breaking features Microsoft pulled off with the Surface Book, one of the crowning achievements is that GPU under the keyboard. The test was run at 1366×768 resolution with 2x AA, no tessellation and medium quality. Heaven 4.0 performanceNext I ran Unigine’s Heaven 4.0 graphics test. The performance gap in the next test opens up that lead even more. As fast as Intel’s Iris 6100 is with its 48 execution units, it’s still not enough. I ran it on both of the graphics chips which is where OpenCL should run.That’s a pretty hefty performance advantage in OpenCL in the Surface Book’s win column. ![]() ![]() Pro For Gaming 2015 Movie To HOn the Mac, OpenCL was used. MOV video file, and then exported the movie to H.264 using the Vimeo preset at 1080p resolution with the maximum render quality setting enabled. Luckily it runs on both platforms, too.For my test I installed a Premiere Pro CC on both laptops, imported a 6.5GB 4K resolution. It originally supported only Nvidia’s CUDA but has since added OpenCL. That’s why my last performance benchmark will be Adobe Premiere Pro Creative Cloud.Premiere Pro has used GPU acceleration for years. Battery lifeThis wouldn’t be complete without a battery run down test. On the Surface Book, it was done literally minutes ahead of the MacBook Pro 13.I leaned on Premiere Pro CC 2015 to encode a 4K H.264 file on both platforms and Surface Book pile drives the Macintosh. For a professional, less time spent rendering means more productivity. The last time I did that resulted in belly aching that the test is unfair because it doesn’t use each OSes’ optimized player.So for this test, I used the QuickTime player on OSX El Capitan. Normally, I like to run the same player, such as VideoLAN, to make it neutral. MOV file from my Premiere Pro encoding test. Audio was left on with the same ear buds in the laptops.For a test file, I used the same 4K-resolution Tears of Steel. I also set the volume to approximately the same volume by listening to a test tone with a set of Samsung ear buds in each computer. That gives the MacBook Pro 13 about a 10 percent greater battery capacity over the Surface Book.After 8 hours, I called it a day. The MacBook Pro 13 has a massive 75 watt-hour battery while the Surface Book’s is about 68 watt hours. The QuickTime player is the default player anyway which some argue is what you should use. On the Surface Book I used Windows Movies and TV player which is also highly optimized for power and Windows 10.Both manufacturers actually claim 12 hours of battery life for movie play back. I had shut both down and left them in place but decided to pick up where I left off. The next morningWhen I clocked in the next morning, I decided to finish draining both laptops. Both laptops actually offer fairly excellent run time overall but neither would have hit their rated life for lower-resolution file playback. What’s really impressive is the Surface Book does it with a touch-screen which can consume 10 percent of run time and a smaller battery too. I could have taken both down to zero, but I wasn’t going to sit in my cubicle and watch the moon rise.I give the Surface Book the win by a small margin. The Surface Book was reporting 29 percent with 2:26 left. I then started both at the beginning with it set to repeat.The MacBook Pro 13 tapped out at 1:41 which was a little short what it had predicted.
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