The Surface Laptop Ultra, powered by the Nvidia RTX Spark superchip, has shown lower performance compared to the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip in various benchmarks. The Surface model is priced at $5,900, which is $2,200 more than the $3,700 MacBook Pro.
Microsoft's device features a 20-core Nvidia Grace CPU, a GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, and 128GB of LPDDR5X unified memory. In contrast, the tested MacBook Pro uses an M5 Pro chip with 64GB of RAM. Nvidia announced the RTX Spark platform in June, with partners including Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and Microsoft.
In CPU-heavy tests like Cinebench 2026, Cinebench 2024, and Blender, the Surface Laptop Ultra trailed behind the MacBook Pro. It also performed worse than systems equipped with the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 in some metrics.
Creative software tests, including Photoshop, Lightroom, and DaVinci Resolve, showed similar trends, with the Surface laptop ranking last in Photoshop. While the device is suitable for gaming, its performance currently aligns with laptop versions of the RTX 5060 or RTX 5070.
In large language model tests using GGUF, the RTX Spark only outperformed the M5 Pro in the Qwen 3.8 Q4 project. Once the load increased to the Q8 model, the M5 Pro regained its lead. Future software optimizations may improve these results.
