Is Microsoft's Surface Book Really Twice as Fast as Apple's MacBook Pro?

At the launch of the Surface Book, Microsoft's first laptop, the company's devices head Panos Panay made several bold claims. He said that the Surface Book was twice as fast as the Apple Macbook Pro. While his claims are somewhat accurate, a recent test has found several concerning inconsistencies in it.

PC World pitted the two laptops against each other in a range of benchmarking tests to see how they fared on different aspects. Tested were the MacBook Pro 13 with an Intel Core i5-5752U, Iris 6100 graphics, and 8GB of RAM with the latest El Capitan build, and the Microsoft Surface Book with an Intel Core i5-6300U, GeForce graphics, and 8GB of RAM, with Windows 10.

On CineBench R15 benchmarking test, for instance, comparing the multi-thread performance found the MacBook Pro 13 was actually faster, scoring 316 points. The Surface Book could only score 302.

A similar result was observed when GeekBench 64-bit multi-threaded test was used to compare the performance of the two laptops. The same MacBook Pro model scored 7,072 points, where the Surface Book with i5-6300U processor coupled with GeForce GPU failed to move the needle past 6,765 points

In LuMark 3 OpenCL Performance LuxBall benchmarking, MacBook Pro scored just 1,500 points whereas Surface Book fared at 2,143. Similarly, on Heaven 4.0 testing, the Surface Book scored 39.3 points against 18.5 the MacBook Pro could manage.

When running Tomb Raider title on the MacBook Pro, the publication found that the game at 1440x900 pixel resolution and normal quality could only offer less than 24 fps gameplay, whereas the title ran seamlessly at 74 fps on the Surface Book - this as PC World pegged it, actually makes the Surface Book three times as fast, at least in terms of real world graphics performance. While trying 4K video playback, the MacBook Pro offered 581 points at performance, whereas the Surface Book scored 637 points.

It is worth pointing out that while PC World's tests have yielded different results from Microsoft's claims, we do not know the exact test conditions Microsoft had used to compare the two laptops.