The Surface Pro 8 is a portable, powerful, versatile Windows tablet from Microsoft that released in 2021.
The Adobe Fresco is a free but splendid sketching, and watercolor painting app that makes creating vector or pixel-based art feel almost natural.
Planning to get a refurbished or second-hand surface pro 8 but wonder if it can run adobe fresco 2024 well for drawing?
Well, you have come to the right place, I will answe you based on my own experience whether it is possible.
Is Microsoft Surface Pro 8 Compatible with Adobe Fresco 2024?
Yes, There is no doubt that you can sketch, draw or paint in Adobe fresco 2024 on Surface pro 8.
I’ve been a fan of Fresco since its announcement and I’ve drawn with it on iPad air, Surface pro 8 and PC.
With Large 13-inch PixelSense display, 2K resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, Slim Pen 2, 11th Gen Intel processor, and Intel Iris Xe graphics card, It is still a powerful device for drawing in Adobe fresco 2024.
Surface pro 8 works beautifully with Adobe fresco, including the impressive Live Brushes! Remember to set the Graphics Preference to High-Performance for Fresco.
16gb RAM is the minium I would recommend for those uses, 8gb is not enough. And i7 would give you another 20-30% performance boost but i5 should be fine. And 512gb SSD means more room for files but not crucial, 256GB is also okay.
Are all microsoft surface pro tablets compatible with adobe fresco?
According to adobe site, the spec Minimum requirement are:
Operating System: Adobe Fresco is supported on all Windows computers having Windows 11 version 22000 or later / Windows 10 version 1903 or later.
Graphics processor: Intel, Nvidia, or AMD* GPU with Direct X Feature Level 12.1.
Tech Specs: 8GB of RAM, and 5GB of available Disk Space.
Not all surface pro tablets are compatible with adobe fresco, some old models like surface pro 1, pro 2 and pro 3 are not able to run adobe fresco.
So make sure your surface pro meets the minimum technical specifications outlined gere. On Windows devices- Surface Pro 4, and newer SP 5, SP 6, SP 7, SP 8, SP 9 (2022), Surface Book 1/SB2, Surface Studio 1/Studio 2 and Surface Go.
If you use a 5G ARM version of surface pro, then Surface Pro X, Surface Pro 9, and Surface Pro 11 (2024) are okay to run adobe fresco.
However, Watercolor brushes, Smudge brushes, and Timelapse videos are currently unsupported on ARM version Surface Pro devices. Plus, When drawing tilted strokes using a Pencil brush on ARM version Surface Pro devices, Adobe Fresco crashes.
If you want to use it for drawing in adobe fresco, Get the intel version rather than ARM version, because the ARM version had severe limitations and doesn’t seem to be as optimized yet for many creativity apps.
Conclusion
The Surface Pro 8 is still fantastic in terms of speed and power. Multitasking all are working great, especially for digital art and graphic design.
As you’d expect, Adobe Fresco 2024 runs really well, as do the photo and video editing apps I tried out, such as Photoshop, illustrator and Premiere Pro.
There’s no dedicated graphics card, which means that graphics-intensive workloads like 4k video editing and 3d animation & design may suffer.
So if you are buying it to use 3d programs or for 4k video editing, it is better not to do so, A pc or laptop with a discrete graphics card will be better suited for such tasks.
Explore More: 10 Best Standalone Drawing Tablets of 2025 that Doesn’t Need a Computer
