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leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,911
Nvidia has now officially released their new generation of GPUs: Maxwell (enjoy one of the many reviews here). It seems like they have indeed followed on their promise of doubling the performance per watt (and the compute performance also seems to get a healthy boost, if you don't need double precision).

Double the GPU speed for the MBP with the same power consumption? Yes please! Extrapolating the benchmark, a 45W Maxwell part should run Battlefield4 at high high settings and full HD resolution with more then 30FPS on average - which is a really healthy boost over the current graphics. Now let's hope Apple will have a refresh before those new Broadwell CPUs are released ;)
 

Laco

macrumors 6502
Apr 23, 2008
375
1
I think they will go integrated all the way. MAYBE they will have a dedicated option for the 15 rMBP but I think that is doubtful.
 

thunng8

macrumors 65816
Feb 8, 2006
1,032
417
I think they will go integrated all the way. MAYBE they will have a dedicated option for the 15 rMBP but I think that is doubtful.

I highly doubt Apple will go integrated only. The gap between Iris Pro and 750M is relatively small (~30-50%) and Apple still went for a dedicated option.

Broadwell won't come until late this year or early next year and is only reported to be 50% faster than the Haswell Iris Pro. With Maxwell likely to double performance compared to 750M, the gap between integrated and discrete just got a lot bigger and will be available shortly.
 

kaellar

macrumors 6502
Nov 12, 2012
441
17
Yep, that perf. per watt increase looks extremely promising.
Having a 780ti+ performance inside 27 iMac? YES, PLEASE!
Lets just hope nvidia won't bury this potential while playing that freakin' marketing games.
 

kaellar

macrumors 6502
Nov 12, 2012
441
17
But what are the release dates for all the cards?

noone knows for sure, but there is almost no doubt that Apple will refresh all of its Mac lines only when Maxwell mobile graphics come out, to slap that fancy "2X PERFORMANCE" labels on slides and the website pages :)
my guess is Autumn'14, since all of the potential Maxwell receivers in Mac lineup were updated Autumn'13.
 

whitedragon101

macrumors 65816
Sep 11, 2008
1,336
334
Excellent.

They have said double performance all along. Its incredible they have actually delivered pretty much double (+80%-100% it seems from the fps).
 

leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,911
my guess is Autumn'14, since all of the potential Maxwell receivers in Mac lineup were updated Autumn'13.

Autumn 14 would be way to late. I am sure the suitable GPUs will be released by end of spring at latest.

All I see is the Maxwell GTX 750 Ti, that's not the whole line or even the 800 series.

That (GM107) is exactly the chip which is suitable for the MBP.
 

Wuiffi

macrumors 6502a
Oct 6, 2011
686
78
I can wait, but a Broadwell + Maxwell (perfect would be TSMCs 20nm) MBP in Q4 would be nice :)
 

simon48

macrumors 65816
Sep 1, 2010
1,315
88
Autumn 14 would be way to late. I am sure the suitable GPUs will be released by end of spring at latest.



That (GM107) is exactly the chip which is suitable for the MBP.

But that's a desktop card...
 

leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,911
But that's a desktop card...

Desktop and mobile cards use the same chip. For example, the 650M/750M/GTX 650 all use GK107 - the difference is mainly clock settings and some minor tweaks.
 

simon48

macrumors 65816
Sep 1, 2010
1,315
88
Desktop and mobile cards use the same chip. For example, the 650M/750M/GTX 650 all use GK107 - the difference is mainly clock settings and some minor tweaks.

That isn't enough of a difference for it not to matter?
 

leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,911
That isn't enough of a difference for it not to matter?

All I am saying that the chip which is most likely go into the Maxwell mobile GPUs suitable for the 15" rMBP is already available to the consumer. Why Nvidia decided to release the desktop product based on it before the laptop one - your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they want to sell out the remaining Kepler stock first.

isn't GK107 an architecture and not a chip?

What does 'architecture' and what does 'chip' mean for you? Whatever you want to call it: the GK107 is a particular microchip design, which consists of two computing cores (each in turn containing 192 microcores) and the controlling logic, with 384 microcores in total. There are number of different products which are all based on (sometimes different revisions of) this design, such as the desktop GT 640 or the mobile GT 650M/GTX 660M. These products are clocked differently, use different memory and might have different thermal characteristics (due to unavoidable individual differences in manufactured microchips) - but they all use essentially the same chip on their base. Sometimes, the chip production fails and a core is damaged - but the company can still disable the defective core and sell the chip with only 192 microcores active (e.g. a particular revision of the GT630). Having a small number of microchip designs and mapping a range of products to them is the basic principle on how microprocessor companies operate.
 

durkkin

macrumors regular
Sep 23, 2013
175
1
I think they will go integrated all the way. MAYBE they will have a dedicated option for the 15 rMBP but I think that is doubtful.

Apple is more concerned with battery life than performance, but performance still matters. I think they will keep doing what they're doing now, integrated in low end, then discrete for professionals that need the power. The fact that Nvidia doubled performance with the same power consumption is incredibly promising. Apple doesn't have to sacrifice battery at all, it would even potentially get better with Broadwell enhancements and battery upgrades, and still get massive performance gains. Now if they can just fix those Nvidia drivers...
 

SarcasticJoe

macrumors 6502a
Nov 5, 2013
607
221
Finland
The desktop cards are available today. Newegg seems to have them in stock.

I wouldn't use the plural form because it's just the lower mid range 750TI that's out and general performance wise it doesn't seem to be that impressive falling behind the Radeon R7 260X in everything except a few select (mostly compute) benchmarks in the Anandtech review.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,911
I wouldn't use the plural form because it's just the lower mid range 750TI that's out and general performance wise it doesn't seem to be that impressive falling behind the Radeon R7 260X in everything except a few select (mostly compute) benchmarks in the Anandtech review.

You are completely missing the point here. Sure, those mid/entry-level cards are not at all impressive from the enthusiast point of view - but you have to take into account that the 750 TI is almost able to match the performance of the R7 260X with half of its TDP (260X is usually rated 115W, the 750TI is 60W)! For mobile graphics, this is indeed quite interesting, as it indicates realistic performance increases of 60-80% with the same power consumption. Thats a ridiculous jump in performance/watt.
 

ha1o2surfer

macrumors 6502
Sep 24, 2013
425
46
You guys are also missing the laptop GPU, the GTX 765m. This has better performance than a 750Ti while only being 50 watts. It IS a mobile GPU but has the same VRAM and Bus interface speed. (TDP on most sites say 75 and that is incorrect) Apple just doesn't want dGPU's inside macbooks anymore and I can't figure out why. They might not see the value in it or temp/noise issues or maybe even power issues from them choosing a low wattage adapter. Whatever the case, Maxwell is impressive but so is the current gen of laptop GPUs.
 

thundersteele

macrumors 68030
Oct 19, 2011
2,984
9
Switzerland
I wouldn't use the plural form because it's just the lower mid range 750TI that's out and general performance wise it doesn't seem to be that impressive falling behind the Radeon R7 260X in everything except a few select (mostly compute) benchmarks in the Anandtech review.

Yeah I was a bit quick with my post, completely forgetting about all the other 7XX and 8XX cards that will come over time.

I was also surprised at first by the low benchmark results (barely beating the 650 sometimes), until I realized that it gets that performance with about half the power consumption. Noise level under load is essentially the same as idle.
This is great for embedded systems and laptops, where thermal constraints limit the power consumption.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,911
You guys are also missing the laptop GPU, the GTX 765m. This has better performance than a 750Ti while only being 50 watts.

How can the 765m have the TDP of 50W if the TDP of 750M (with half as many computational units) is 45W? This is simply not possible.
 

cirus

macrumors 6502a
Mar 15, 2011
582
0
You guys are also missing the laptop GPU, the GTX 765m. This has better performance than a 750Ti while only being 50 watts. It IS a mobile GPU but has the same VRAM and Bus interface speed. (TDP on most sites say 75 and that is incorrect) Apple just doesn't want dGPU's inside macbooks anymore and I can't figure out why. They might not see the value in it or temp/noise issues or maybe even power issues from them choosing a low wattage adapter. Whatever the case, Maxwell is impressive but so is the current gen of laptop GPUs.

The 750Ti is significantly more powerful. While using the same amount of power.

765m = underclocked 650 TI.

750TI is a tiny bit slower than the 650 TI boost (memory bandwidth bound).

The 765m is not 50W or the 750m is not 45W. Notebookcheck rates the 765m as 60-65W.
 

SarcasticJoe

macrumors 6502a
Nov 5, 2013
607
221
Finland
You are completely missing the point here. Sure, those mid/entry-level cards are not at all impressive from the enthusiast point of view - but you have to take into account that the 750 TI is almost able to match the performance of the R7 260X with half of its TDP (260X is usually rated 115W, the 750TI is 60W)! For mobile graphics, this is indeed quite interesting, as it indicates realistic performance increases of 60-80% with the same power consumption. Thats a ridiculous jump in performance/watt.
Sure, it beats the less expensive and higher performance R7 260X in performance-per-watt, but the difference isn't as big as you make it out to be. In gaming the 260X doesn't go higher than 92W according to Tom's Hardware and it's still considerably faster. You should also remember that 60W is still well above what Apple likes to put into it's laptops and AMD hasn't released any Hawaii chips other than top-of-the-line stuff.

So let's see how AMD's and Nvdia's new architectures scale across the spectrum before we start going nuts over them.
 
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