For the last few weeks, gadget fans have been ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the technical specs on Microsoft’s recently announced high-end tablet/laptop hybrid, the Surface Book, but one piece of hardware has been conspicuously absent from some of the more in-depth system descriptions: the GPU.

Until now, all we really knew about the Surface Book’s dedicated custom GPU was the fact that it has one and the fact that it is made by Nvidia Corp., but new reports suggest that the mystery GPU is equivalent to Nvidia’s GeForce 940M, a mid-range chip that doesn’t exactly raise any eyebrows for graphics-minded gamers. The GPU specs were discovered by a few Redditors who managed to run diagnostic tools like GPU-Z on display models of the Surface Book.

The GeForce 940M is moderately impressive for an average laptop that is not explicitly dedicated to gaming, and the Surface Book will likely be able to handle most modern game at low to medium settings and scaled down resolutions.

Compared to laptops that are explicitly dedicated to gaming, however, the Surface Book appears to be somewhat lackluster, but that is not necessarily a knock against the device.

For one thing, gaming laptops tend to be rather monstrous in both size and power consumption, with many weighing in at around six pounds (or 12 pounds, in the case of some behemoth Alienware laptops), and their battery life is often around three or four hours. Meanwhile, the Surface Book weighs a little over three pounds with the keyboard attached, and Microsoft claims the battery will last for up to 12 hours of video playback.

For users who care more about portability than high-end graphics, the Surface Book definitely has the edge over your average gaming laptop, but what about compared to its more obvious competition, the next generation Macbook Pro?

Until some real graphics benchmarks are done on both systems, it is hard to say which is technically better from a hardware perspective, but since Mac hasn’t really been competitive as a video game platform since the days of Myst in the early 1990s, the Surface Book already has an edge simply by being a Windows machine, with a vastly expanded game library and better support from game developers in general.

Image courtesy of Microsoft Corp