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650M vs. 750M benchmarks (and other Haswell RMBP thoughts)

D

drvelocity

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 20, 2008
119
94
Just got my 2.6Ghz Haswell RMBP today and the first thing I did was run the Heaven benchmark to determine how much faster the 750M is than my old 2.3 Ghz RMBP with the 650M. Long story short - it's not. At 1440x900/Medium quality, the 650M got 22.2 FPS, and the 750M got 23FPS for a measly increase of 3.6%.

Update: At 1920x1200/High Quality, the 650M got 12.8 FPS and the 750M 13.4 FPS, a 4.6% increase.

heaven_650m.jpg

heaven_750m.png


Second benchmark (1920x1200, High settings) - 650M 12.8 FPS, 750M 13.4 FPS:

650M_1920.jpg

750M_1920.jpg



Other thoughts:

I got a "yellow screen", which at first is a bit off putting but not a big deal to me though. Oddly in some ways it seems more crisp and comfortable on the eyes.

Battery life also appears to be ho-hum, perhaps even worse than my old system, but I'll need to do more testing to determine that.

Doing more Heavenly tests now to test different resolutions.
 
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I don't see how this makes sense. Maybe there are driver issues...

I'm curious about the answer to fatlardo's question. If it is not using less heat than the 650m than there must be a driver issue...
 
could you run battlefield 3 or 4 on it? Only thing i care about really.
 
Branskins said:
I don't see how this makes sense. Maybe there are driver issues...

I'm curious about the answer to fatlardo's question. If it is not using less heat than the 650m than there must be a driver issue...
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they are the same damn gpu, I don't know what expectations people have when they are the same damn thing
 
Mr MM said:
they are the same damn gpu, I don't know what expectations people have when they are the same damn thing
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Yup...

Apple should just have called the 750m a 650m when they underclocked it, and get rid of all the confusion.
 
NVIDIA commonly rebrands old GPU's as new ones this isn't the first time they've done this and certainly will not be the last.

I was under no illusions when I bought mine that the 750m inside was just a rebadged 650m with minor if any specification changes.

This update was about Haswell, 802.11ac, Iris Pro and PCIe storage. The 750m change was just so they didn't get beat up by the press for including a yesteryear GPU while their competitors included a 750m, we all know they are the same and so does the press but they'd still get schtick over it.
 
Mr MM said:
they are the same damn gpu, I don't know what expectations people have when they are the same damn thing
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I don't care if they are the same, but if the speeds are the same I would expect it to run cooler or something (which it look like it might). It should at least be more efficient
 
Branskins said:
I don't care if they are the same, but if the speeds are the same I would expect it to run cooler or something (which it look like it might). It should at least be more efficient
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There are no major changes between the two, the 750M is the 650M slightly over clocked, they are the same card.
 
Branskins said:
I don't care if they are the same, but if the speeds are the same I would expect it to run cooler or something (which it look like it might). It should at least be more efficient
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They are the same exact card, so I wouldn't expect too much out of efficiency.
 
There have been a few people questioning the quality of the drivers for the 750 under Mavericks. I'm sure in an update or .1 there will be better drivers. The 750 is almost just a small revision of the 650 anyway so I don't think anyone expected a large increase.
 
It's impossible for there to be any major improvement anywhere (performance, heat, power consumption). They're the exact same chip. Before you say "but the clocks," the problem here is that Apple bought top of the line 650m chips from Nvidia last year with guaranteed over-clocking performance (we generally see these chips in the desktop world as "factory over-clocked," like EVGA's "Super-Clocked" series).

The performance of those chips was the pinnacle of what the 650m GPU chip can deliver. There's simply nowhere to go from there; the 650m chips being produced this year (as the 750m) are basically just more of those "golden" 650m chips that Apple already had.

Why not just buy "even more golden" chips? They don't exist. Can't be produced. Simple as that. Or to be more accurate, the 750m chips Apple got this year are that, but the limit has been reached; the gains seen with "even better" chips are super-minimal.

It's possible that there are some missing driver optimizations that could help a bit (for example, try running Minecraft on the 750m... you'll get half the performance of the 650m and it won't even heat up or draw more than 1.3A out of a possible ~3A). The temperature results on the 750m suggest that it may have a little headroom that the OS/drivers aren't "asking" for correctly (which can be an issue on Kepler chips in general because of their on-demand boosting system).

That sounds nonsensical due to the identical chips, but it's entirely possible that the 750m chips require slightly different voltage and power draw curves to operate at full efficiency (which would be supported by them not producing as much heat at load as the 650m did). Alternatively the drivers may be deliberately configured to produce less heat and use less power to deliver nearly identical performance.
 
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Personally I would have preferred a stock clocked, or maybe a little under clocked 765. Its an over all better chip even if they had run it at lower clocks/voltage to avoid heat. They could have gotten more performance out of it, and it's still just the Entry level performance mobile card right now. The 750 is the top of the mid range.
 
GSPice said:
Broadwell and Maxwell.
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Yep. Would have preferred to wait myself, but I couldn't deal with the Arrandale 17" for another full year. The Haswell 15" will be sold when we get near refresh time and I'll just accept the $500-$600 (or whatever) hit as the cost of staying with the cutting edge.
 
I typically get every 3rd revision. Otherwise I just don't feel I'm seeing enough of a difference in performance to justify my money.
 
Okay, I'll come out and say it: I'm officially struggling with this Haswell purchase.

I need a new MBP to replace my stolen 17", but I feel cornered by the choices before me, and borderline resentful that I'm being forced (by fate) to purchase a machine from a generation offering one of the least impressive performance bumps in recent memory.

I realize there's "always something better around the corner", but in this case it feels especially cruel to think the brand new machine I'm buying today will likely be significantly "more obsolete" a year from now than the 2012 retina is today.

It's making me consider looking for a good deal on a used machine--or even just buying the base 2012 rMBP refurb--and then selling it off when a more significant generational upgrade comes along--whether that's Broadwell, or later.

Sorry--First World problems, I know, I know...

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Mac.User said:
I typically get every 3rd revision. Otherwise I just don't feel I'm seeing enough of a difference in performance to justify my money.
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+1. I just wrote 10 lines of text to say the same thing. ;)
 
Atomic Walrus said:
Yep. Would have preferred to wait myself, but I couldn't deal with the Arrandale 17" for another full year. The Haswell 15" will be sold when we get near refresh time and I'll just accept the $500-$600 (or whatever) hit as the cost of staying with the cutting edge.
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That's precisely what I'm gonna do..
 
GSPice said:
That's precisely what I'm gonna do..
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I wish I could be so casual. I generally don't like to "worry" about upgrading for 4-5 years when I buy a new MBP. To go through the hassle of migrating over to another new machine again, the hassle selling a rather big ticket item, potentially being without a laptop for a few weeks in the interim... not to mention, the insane amount of OCD visits to this forum in anticipation of the next release... I dunno, it's all far from ideal.
 
johnnylarue said:
I wish I could be so casual. I generally don't like to "worry" about upgrading for 4-5 years when I buy a new MBP. To go through the hassle of migrating over to another new machine again, the hassle selling a rather big ticket item, potentially being without a laptop for a few weeks in the interim... not to mention, the insane amount of OCD visits to this forum in anticipation of the next release... I dunno, it's all far from ideal.
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It all depends on what you enjoy. That sounds like a good time to me (aside from the time without a machine), but there's probably something wrong with me:

One of my favorite things is "new desktop day." Piles of new components, the hassle of installing it all in a case, getting the CPU and heat sink installed (cause of death: long-term Arctic Silver toxicity), BIOS config, the hoop-jumping that is doing a clean Windows install (Win 7 bootable USB + already-used serial -> Win 8 bootable USB -> clean install so it doesn't check the old serial), reinstalling all the drivers and software, migrating actual files over... Good times.

Whoops, way off topic. Uuuuhhhh.. I really do think we could see some small improvements from drivers or OS updates. Kepler has a lot of possible tweaks that regulate power draw (which you can do yourself on Windows), and if something's wrong on the default settings it might not be pulling as much power as it theoretically could considering its thermal limits.
 
johnnylarue said:
I wish I could be so casual. I generally don't like to "worry" about upgrading for 4-5 years when I buy a new MBP. To go through the hassle of migrating over to another new machine again, the hassle selling a rather big ticket item, potentially being without a laptop for a few weeks in the interim... not to mention, the insane amount of OCD visits to this forum in anticipation of the next release... I dunno, it's all far from ideal.
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Oh I totally understand and agree. My reasoning is that if Haswell is a blip compared to a near future ( ~1 year) major, major improvement across the board, I'd keep that machine for 4-5 years.

But I wouldn't sell a notebook until after I purchased a new one.
 
These are all OSX benchmarks. Did anybody consider that in OSX there is no Nvidia Boost feature available. 967 vs 900 Mhz seems to explain about the performance difference.
The main difference of the 700M series is the boost feature, which should push the 750M up to 15% beyond base clock, if heat is not an issue and the power supply plays along. It seems those boost clocks are simply not active in OSX.
In Windows they might not be either with bootcamp drivers but at least with modded drivers they should be.
That means it should top out around 1112 Mhz not 967.
But in OSX 967 seems to be the limit and there is simply no GPU Boost 2.0.

Yes it is just a 650M but it should still be a bit better than what the op shows. Anybody with modded drivers can push his 650M probably to almost the same levels but stock vs stock the 750M should be 15-20% faster not 4-7%.

Somebody should post some Windows benchmarks to see if it is a cooling issue or just an OSX driver issue.
 
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