Surface Book's Nvidia GPU?

I am betting that it is a GT 945m which is featured (with no specifications) on Nvidia's website, but to my knowledge no notebook uses it- it's also conspicuously missing from notebookcheck. It's a step up from a 940m (Listed as 5x times performance, whereas a 940m is listed as 4x) and still not quite a 950m. The only thing that doesn't fit is that the Nvidia page lists the GPU as DDR3, not GDDR5. Microsoft has already confirmed that 1GB of GDDR5 would power the Nvidia GPU.

Seems most logical. This is the most frustrating part of the new Surface Book to me so far, since I'm interested in an ultra portable device that can also be powerful when needed. Hopefully we find out soon...!

 

My bet is on BGA version of Quadro M600M, 30W TDP looks like covers difference between listed power supplies, announced just a week ago, supports GDDR5, certified drivers for pro applications etc. Whatever it is I don't think we're going to be blown away by its performance, otherwise they would just say what it is. And since they didn't - it is the slowest professional chip of current generation.

 

Hoping whatever DGPU they use is at least sinificantly better than the Intel HD 520 or itll be a waste of money.

 

The TDP is a good point, it's probably got to be around 20, 25 max. I think it said it was shipping with a 45w power supply (correct me if I'm wrong) and the U series CPU's are ~15w. Then everything else needs power too. Hmmm.

Edit: Whoops, I guess the base is 65w, that'd allow for more room to play with.

 

i was asking myself that very same question@which nvidia gpu is in the surface book.

btw, is it cooled passively or does it sport fans? with a 65w psu id say fans, but that would suck big time considering its also supposed to work as a tablet...

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It is cooled with fans, there was an internal cut-away picture during the presentation that showed the nVidia GPU had a fan (possibly even two).

If you disconnect the 'Tablet' portion, you actually lose the GPU functionality all together- if the Surface Pro 4 actually has the 64mb Dedicated L4 Cache (which again, the cut away pictures showed it having 3 Die parts instead of 2 like the i5's have) it might be the better buy to use purely as a tablet- the previous Intel GPU's with dedicated RAM were quite quick- I believe close to GT 750m's and now the Intel chips are sporting more shaders. ~GTX 760m level performance in a super slim surface would be awesome.

 

Another interesting question- are the 4th gen Surface family going to use DDR4?

 

would make sense considering the energy savings compared to ddr3 (and thats what this slim form factor is all about, after all). seeing as all current smartphones flagships even sport lpddr4, it would be prudent for microsoft to have implemented it into its very first notebook

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You'd think so, but cost cutting and availability of parts might not agree

 

at that price point? cmon M$, dont disappoint us (again)

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I never even really factored in the Quadro chips from Nvidia into my guesses. I would think that they are probably going to go that route because they are positioning the computer as a "professional/work" style device opposed to a gaming or multimedia machine. I know my Nvidia consumer chips pretty well but when it comes to quadro chips I am pretty clueless. Either way I am anxiously awaiting confirmation on what kind of chip they are going to use before I take the $2000 plunge.

 

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-M1000M.151582.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-M600M.151583.0.html

Either one of these fit the theoretical bill if they are using Quadro, the M1000M is of particular note, since it could actually come as a 945m (512 Shaders, 128Bit GDDR5 custom built to 1GB instead of 2)

 

“[The] Surface Book with the optional discrete GPU uses a custom Nvidia GeForce GPU designed for Surface Book and based on the Maxwell architecture. Featuring 1GB GDDR5 high-speed memory, it was customized to deliver accelerated graphics performance within Surface Book’s versatile form factor,”

“The new GPU is a Maxwell based GPU with GDDR5 memory,” an Nvidia spokesperson said. “It was designed to deliver the best performance in ultra-thin form factors such as the Surface Book keyboard dock. Given its unique implementation and design in the keyboard module, it cannot be compared to a traditional 900M series GPU.”

The company directed me to Nvidia’s blog, which confirms that it’s an “8M” and has a 1GB GDDR5 frame buffer. So for that one chip, you’ll have to wait a bit more to find out just what kind of performance the Nvidia GPU nets you.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2989...-surface-pro-4-chips-and-why-they-matter.html

 

All that info is well known, we're just trying to figure out exactly what we could expect.

 

Curious as well, although I'm more interested in the SP4 than the Book. The Book isn't fast enough to replace my main laptop, and I use my SP3 daily for work and pleasure on the go in tablet mode, so don't need or want the larger size.

I'm just wondering, depending on which GPU the Book uses how it will compare to the i7 Iris option in the SP4. I love my i7 SP3, but the throttling drives me nuts. Hoping their new cooling setup works better in both the SP4 and the Book.

 

Well whoever Dennis Beatty is posted on twitter that it's a modified GTX 960m with 1gb of GDDR5 ram

Twitter posted:
@boopbibabooi @Microsoft GPU is a modified Nvidia GTX 960M with 1G DDR5 Memory.

https://twitter.com/DennisBeatty/status/652296953728995329

That'd be real nice if it was the case.

 

Job title could point to insider information, but if anyone could check his LinkedIn we might have a better idea if this is guessing or not.

 

wow, 960M would ne insane for that form factor i wonder why ms didnt advertize that in the first place! not that theyd need the extra publicity, but still...

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I was hoping for at least a 950M but if it's a modded 960M I'm sold!
Only thing that is sort of a let down is battery life of the tablet itself when not attached to the keyboard base.

 

is it? whats the battery life undocked? also, im assuming the keyboard has an additional battery pack inside it?

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The keyboard dock base contains 2/3 of the battery per MS's presentation, IIRC @jaybee83

 

tbh, im getting all my info outta this thread

 

Hey, that's what the forums are for! I think that's good!

 

I've heard you can expect about 12 hours of battery life in laptop mode and about 3 hours in tablet mode undocked.

 

ouch, that does indeed kinda suck in tablet mode

does this thing also have two cpus, as in ARM SoC in display, intel in dock? or just the intel one? if the latter is the case, then that might be the reason for the bad battery life that and the fact that the cooling system takes up so much space...

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Intel is in the SB Tablet portion along with a co-processor devoted to the screen. Nvidia in the base. The battery life doesn't concern me too much about Tablet only, because I can't imagine not leaving it docked most of the time.

 

something you can also note that if you want you can take the screen and put it on the keyboard backward (so keyboard is hidden) and you will also be able to get the battery from the base, sure it wont be as thin as just the tablet but you will also get the battery. also (i heard this all on a podcast) the connector is the same for the power as it is for the connector for the base so you might be able to plug the power adaptor right into the tablet port. dont take this as fact, its just what i heard from a podcast by folks that focus on windows products.

 

Yes you can charge just the tablet itself

 

For everyone that is still trying to figure out the most comparable Model Nvidia GPU to the Surface Book's dedicated GPU, I may have some info for you. I spoke to a Microsoft Tech at my local Microsoft Store where they had one on display with a dgpu. Upon bringing up this question, he quickly opened the device manager and found the driver specifications for the Nvidia card on the Surface Book and took to the internet to see what it had to say. It came out to be most similar to the Nvidia 840 in his search. He said that it may be actually higher than that (higher 800s or low 900s), but only a GPU test would be able to tell that (which unfornuately they cannot do on display model). Just some food for thought for all those that were curious.

 

Lower 900's sounds more accurate- there's very little chance Nvidia would go back a generation to the 800 cards for this product. 945 seems more and more plausible.

 

These are just loads of speculation, some are saying cut-down 960M, some are saying 950M, 945M. Nobody knows anything as it is a custom GPU and we need to benchmark the GPU first to know about it. Since it is a new, custom GPU you won't get correct name even if you check by GPU verifying tools, it will just flag any other inaccurate name.

 

Here is GPU-Z screenshot from Surface Book:



Here is a comparison with GTX 940M:



Source:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3p91kt/microsoft_store_allowed_me_to_sign_in_as_an/

 

so its a 940M with half the memory, lower clocked core and higher clocked vRAM, interesting

 

One more piece of puzzle revealed (from Nvidia Control Panel):

- GPU memory bandwidth of Surface Book is 40.08 GB/s (vs 28.8 GB/s for 940M)

http://hexus.net/tech/news/laptop/87353-microsoft-surface-book-nvidia-geforce-gpu-details-emerge/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3p2yrj/my_ms_store_has_a_dgpu_surface_book_what_tests/

 

And we've got the first Surface Book review including graphics benchmarks:







http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/surface-book-review-the-laptop-that-replaces-your-tablet/

 

ice storm and cinebench scores dont make sense, how is the i5/igpu so much better there than the i7/dgpu combo? doesnt make sense...

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Possibly Optimus's fault? I saw that and was confused, too.

 

Those "lower-end" 3dmark benchmarks were always kinda weird. Only firestrike and 3dmark 11 are somehow reliable (correlate reasonably well with modern games performances, GPU performance in expected ordering/relative scale).

Cinebench has a decent CPU test but its GPU test is outdated and can be all over the place too.

That said, anomalies like that could point to either driver bugs (that Nvidia GPU is new, custom made for Surface Book, not "battle-tested") or throttling (e.g. cause of CPU spinning faster with smaller GPU bottleneck).

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We shall see when people will try some gaming on it. Faster GPU but with smaller VRAM will likely produce even more anomalies.

I'm curious how Surface Book will compare to Asus Zenbook with GTX 940M. Right now these two are the only devices in this category with not completely crappy GPU.

So far I couldn't find graphics benchmarks for Skylake version of Asus Zenbook (with dGPU). Haswell / Broadwell versions seem to have worse 3dmark results than Surface Book (~1,400 vs ~1,900 in firestrike).

 

Those results are highly suspect to me...

 

And some more GPU-centric benchmarks, comparing Surface Book to 13" Macbook Pro. It beats it by a huge margin in Unigine Heaven, Tomb Raider and Adobe Premiere (like what you would expect).









http://www.pcworld.com/article/2995...nt-twice-as-fast-its-three-times-as-fast.html

 

Well thats pretty awesome. Only a little bit longer until some real gaming benchmarks come out for it, but so far its not looking bad at all.

 

This video went up a couple days ago. Running GPU-Z revealed that it's the equivalent of a 940M with 1 GB of memory.

So you can game decently on it. You could probably play Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and Arkham City on Medium to High settings. Just don't expect it to handle memory-intensive games like Fallout 4 or the newer stuff coming out soon (Overwatch, No Man's Sky, Star Wars: Battlefront, etc.)

 

haha, thats insane, playing bioshock / arkham city on a friggin tablet

 

Battlefront at lower settings is not that hard so it could probably run it. Also Panoz said that the overwatch video that was demonstrated was actually played on the SBook, so yup, I bet you can play that too. The 940m is a respectable card and DDR5 ram (even at 1gb opposed to 2gb) will help.

 

Seems most logical. This is the most frustrating part of the new Surface Book to me so far, since I'm interested in an ultra portable device that can also be powerful when needed. Hopefully we find out soon...!

 

gtav and tomb raider both running very smoothly, over 60fps, resolution is around 1400x900 or something. skyrim flies as well. its not like my gt80 titan, but still really darn impressive, especially with the stellar display on this thing. somehow it makes even low resolution gaming look sharp. have to see it to believe it.

 

NotebookCheck review is up:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Book-Core-i5-Nvidia-GPU-Notebook-Review.153126.0.html

Surface Book GPU performance seem to be between 940M and 945M.

 

that is some crazy performance for a friggin tablet... thats more than 20% of a 980M stock!

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It's technically not a tablet but a 2-1
Still like you said pretty impressive but I'm sure as you know to get the full power of the GPU it needs to be docked into the keyboard.
If it only wasn't so darn expensive.......

 

Does anyone know how the gpu communicates with tablet? What speed bus and thunderbolt type connection?

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