22 PCWorld JUNE 2020NEWS WHY MICROSOFT NEEDS AN XBOX LAPTOP
The Xbox Series X’s custom AMD chip.The decision makes sense for the high-
end Surface Book 3! Microsoft’s always
pitched its detachable laptop as a high-
performance notebook for pros, a more
versatile alternative to Apple’s MacBook Pro.
Quadro fits perfectly. But the Surface Book
doesn’t get updated very often, and with
Microsoft’s gaming divisions pushing so hard
on real-time ray tracing, it’s a shame that you
won’t be able to take full advantage of games
that support the technology on the only
Surface device with discrete graphics.HIGHLIGHTING
MICROSOFT’S BEST
Microsoft created the Surface to highlight the
best of Windows, to show what’s possibleconfigurations, and all but two rely on Nvidia’s
GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti GPUs.
They’re fine gaming options—especially the
GTX 1660 Ti—but Nvidia’s GTX 16-series
graphics don’t include the dedicated
hardware required to accelerate real-time ray
tracing. Two Surface Book 3 versions include
Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 3000 GPUs, which do
support ray tracing, but those workstation-
class cards can’t run Nvidia’s Game Ready
GeForce drivers. GeForce drivers get
updated frequently to include optimizations
for the latest games. Quadro cards need to
use either Quadro drivers or the creation-
focused Nvidia Studio drivers (go.pcworld.
com/nstd), which revolve around more
professional use cases.