With NVIDIA GeForce GPU powering this new hybrid, users will be able to speed up productivity apps such as Adobe Illustrator and Lightroom, and light PC gaming.” This suggests that it’s not a hugely powerful chip - maybe not even a GTX series chip - since Nvidia is talking more about productivity compute rather than 3D graphics compute. Nvidia tells us: “The new GPU is a Maxwell-based GPU, and was designed to deliver the best performance in ultra-thin form factors such as the Surface Book keyboard dock. Nvidia does say that the GPU is new, and as yet unannounced, suggesting that it might be a semi-custom chip developed specifically for the Surface Book and sitting in between models in the existing line-up. The new laptop includes an NVIDIA GeForce GPU.” Microsoft has teased us in a couple of different ways, referring to the dGPU as an “optional NVIDIA GeForce Graphics Processor with dedicated 1GB GDDR5 high-speed memory”, with “the full power of hardware-accelerated graphics” - but there’s no more detail than that, at least for now.

The word from our Nvidia spokesperson is this: “Microsoft has announced a new laptop named the Microsoft Surface Book. The sweet spot is obviously somewhere in the middle, considering that the GPU is driving a high-resolution display but only has the keyboard dock’s thin chassis and relatively low-Wattage battery to work with. There are eleven current mobile graphics chipsets currently available in Nvidia’s line-up for Microsoft to choose off the shelf, ranging from the extremely basic GeForce 910M and 920M to the more powerful GTX series, including the GTX 950M all the way up to the desktop-grade, power-hungry GTX 980 ( non-M). But we don’t know what graphics processor exactly that Nvidia and Microsoft are using in the Surface Book.

Microsoft surface book 1