I have successfully used a Lenovo Tab 8 for a year. I want to move up to a Surface Pro 7 i7 with 16gb ram. Does it work well for Zwift? Are there known issues? Also considering the Samsung Galaxy 8+ 12 inch and Surface Book 3, however, I like the tablet design. The Nvdia GPU in SB3 is in the keyboard base. Please chime in with your experiences. Thanks.
I’m sure there are many people successfully using a Surface Pro for Zwift but equally there are many people who have issues such as it not working at all through to BT dropping signals.
Currently my primary Zwift machine is a 7 year old Dell XPS 13 with i7, 8GB, Intel Iris graphics. I use this with an ANT+ USB stick and have zero problems other than occasionally choppy (but usually fine) graphics in big group rides.
I also have used a Samsung Tab S7+ with Bluetooth. No performance issues, but graphics don’t match the laptop and there are functional constraints i don’t appreciate. Specifically, no distance shown to riders/leaders behind me and no F10 function to capture the summary screens to Zwift at the end of a session.
I can only imagine that you’ll have no problems with your listed hardware, but personally I’d head in the Windows direction for reasons given above.
EDIT : sample screen print from my lappy…
I have not used these products, however there are fairly regular reports of problems running Zwift on PCs with 10th/11th/12th generation CPUs that have Intel integrated graphics. The Surface Book 3 with Nvidia GPU will almost certainly give better graphics quality and reliability compared to the Surface Pro 7. The Android tablets will offer the worst graphics quality and frame rates compared to a decent PC, but may be more reliable than the Surface Pro 7.
This might help you understand what to expect in terms of graphics quality and frame rates:
I only know from the work Surface Pro which is an i7 (it’s one of the black ones) - it struggles with work tasks (which is just general email, teams, etc), I wouldn’t want to push Zwift onto it.
From what I’ve seen the Surface Book 3 might be better, but I didn’t use one yet.
I have a Surface Pro 7 with an i5 processor bought in 2019 and have used it for Zwift on occasion. I prefer the simplicity of using my AppleTV4k but on the odd day that it isn’t cooperating the Surface Pro has worked fine.