New iPad Pro Beats MacBook Pro on Performance Tests

When Apple unveiled its new iPad Pro tablet at WWDC earlier this month, the company said that the slate is more powerful than some notebooks. What it didn't say is it might be more powerful than some of Apple's own notebooks.

The folks over at the BareFeats blog, a site that evaluates device performance, have posted benchmark scores comparing the iPad Pro with Apple's MacBook Pro, including the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. And the site found that in certain cases, Apple's 2017 iPad Pro can outperform the MacBook Pro.

First up, BareFeats shared the GeekBench 4 single-core CPU benchmark. The 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro took the top spot with a score of 4,650, topping the iPad Pro at 3,951. It was a similar story on the multi-core CPU test, where the MacBook Pro topped 10,261, beating the iPad Pro's 9,332.

On Metal graphics tests, however, everything changed. The 10.5-inch iPad Pro scored a whopping 27,814, besting the 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro's 26,353 score. On the GFXBench metal Manhattan test, the 2017 12.9-inch iPad Pro scored 44 and the 10.5-inch nabbed a 42. The 2017 MacBook Pro could only muster a score of 37.

MORE: iPad Pro vs. MacBook: Which Should You Buy?

Finally, when the devices were put to the test on GFXBench's Metal T-Rex test, the 12.9- and 10.5-inch iPad Pros scored 219 and 215, respectively. The 2017 13-inch MacBook Score scored a 199.

But it might get even better for iPad Pro owners.

The BareFeats testing compared the iPad Pro not against a lower-end MacBook Pro, but against one of the more powerful versions, featuring a 3.5-GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB drive. The iPad Pro, in other words, was able to keep pace, and in some cases, beat, a high-end MacBook Pro. And when compared to a similarly equipped 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro, the iPad Pro performed even better.

The benchmark tests also corroborate LAPTOP's own findings about the iPad Pro.

In our review of the slate, we found the tablet to be "amazingly fast" and "more powerful than most laptops."