Non gamer: 660m good enough?

Kirk said:

Planning to order the 27" iMac whenever they become available.

As a graphic designer I will primarily be using Adobe CS6 (and beyond) and iPhoto (later on probably Aperture or Lightroom). Any reason for me not to go for the low end with the GTX 660m and 512 MB of VRAM?

Will probably not be playing any games or editing video, so will an upgrade to the 675mx just be a waste of money for me?

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I think the higher end cards will benefit 3D modeling and VRAM limited applications. If you are not going to be using these applications then you are going to be fine with the 660M. It is used in the top end mbp which is aimed at serious tasks. You are better off going with a fusion drive.

Tri-stan said:

I think the higher end cards will benefit 3D modeling and VRAM limited applications. If you are not going to be using these applications then you are going to be fine with the 660M. It is used in the top end mbp which is aimed at serious tasks. You are better off going with a fusion drive.

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Correction: the MBP is on 650M. Otherwise I agree.

If you're doing primarly 2D work the 660M is good enough for sure.

Since Apple switched to Nvidia, it's worth noting the Adobe CS6 uses Cuda acceleration

http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe-cs6.html

So I'd say upgrading the video card will totally yield much better/quicker results, especially for Adobe CS6.

Is it worth? Since you can't customize the new iMacs yet, I have no idea. Wait until it's released and see.

For reference, how much more powerful is the 660m than the xenos GPU inside the xbox360?

My brother has rMBP with the 650m and he edits 21MP RAW photos with many layers without any problems. I think you should be good.

This may help put it in perspective.

I occasionally play Warcraft on my 15 rMBP via the 27 inch TB display. It runs well.

Kirk said:

As a graphic designer I will primarily be using Adobe CS6 (and beyond) and iPhoto (later on probably Aperture or Lightroom). Any reason for me not to go for the low end with the GTX 660m and 512 MB of VRAM?

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Do you plan to be using any fancy filters that manipulate a significant amount of pixels?

HurtinMinorKey said:

For reference, how much more powerful is the 660m than the xenos GPU inside the xbox360?

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I don't know, like a billion times better? Kidding, but not that far off. Remember, the GPU on the xbox 360 is over 7 years old...the stone ages. THe 660M is only 7 months old.

Here are the specs of the xbox 360's GPU chip, taken from this website.

http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/1144/The-Xbox-360-System-Specifications/p1

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
500 MHz
10 MB embedded DRAM
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines
Unified shader architecture


And here are the specs of the 660M, taken from this website.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-660M.71859.0.html

Architecture Kepler
Pipelines 384 - unified
Core Speed * 835 MHz
Shader Speed * 835 MHz
Memory Speed * 2000 MHz
Memory Bus Width 128 Bit
Memory Type GDDR5
Max. Amount of Memory 2048 MB


But what's good about Nvidia GPUs in general is they have Cuda cores, and lots of Pro applications like Photoshop and After Effects and DaVinci Resolve have Cuda acceleration, so more Cuda cores will make those pro applications will perform much better, with less stress on the CPU.