Begging apple for a MBP with a 980m

[nateo200]

External thunderbolt GPU's are one solution as others pointed out BUT the bandwidth for gaming is not enough....I mean unless you have the combined bandwidth of 2+ Thunderbolt 2 ports aggregated. For video rendering and a few other tasks bandwidth doesn't need to be THAT high....I'd kill just to be able to plug in dual GTX 780Ti's or even 680's into each of my Thunderbolt 1 ports for better rendering in After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, FCP X (if supported), etc. allot of these apps you can assign a GPU for specific things to take the stress off your main GPU. I really hope Apple keeps an option open for dGPU, even if its not the top end one I firmly believe dGPU's will for much of the future the best choice.

 

[Anitramane]

MSI GT72 Thickness: 48mm
15" rMBP Thickness: 18mm

Razer Blade with 870m 17.8mm ;-)

It's totally possible for apple to do better graphics they just don't. It's not the market they're aiming for.

Apple computers are all about the masses, not gamers, IT specialists or media creators.

Windows is still the gamers OS of choice.

 

[nateo200]

Razer Blade with 870m 17.8mm ;-)

It's totally possible for apple to do better graphics they just don't. It's not the market they're aiming for.

Apple computers are all about the masses, not gamers, IT specialists or media creators.

Windows is still the gamers OS of choice.

Exactly. Although many prefer Mac's for creating media but Apple seams to neglect them...the new Mac Pro is great but its kind of frustrating with some of the decisions they made with it....I still think it was a mistake to use AMD GPU's instead of Nvidia ones for example. There are so many video editors and film production house bleeding off to HP, Dell, whatever just to have the choice of GPU's, HDD/SSD's, CPU's, etc.

 

[Anitramane]

Exactly. Although many prefer Mac's for creating media but Apple seams to neglect them...the new Mac Pro is great but its kind of frustrating with some of the decisions they made with it....I still think it was a mistake to use AMD GPU's instead of Nvidia ones for example. There are so many video editors and film production house bleeding off to HP, Dell, whatever just to have the choice of GPU's, HDD/SSD's, CPU's, etc.

I think the new Mac Pro is weak in the CPU and RAM part. 2 CPUs, 8 slots and one GPU would've been better. Especially if you could CTO Nvidia or Amd.
That's one thing that is great about the old mac pro. It has more options than the new one.
I heard rumors doing that Apple was going to offer other GPUs but we'll just have to wait and see. Seems Apple wants to push Open CL instead of Cuda.

HPs and Dells workstations really are amazing, and I agree, Apple is neglecting media creators.

 

[nateo200]

I think the new Mac Pro is weak in the CPU and RAM part. 2 CPUs, 8 slots and one GPU would've been better. Especially if you could CTO Nvidia or Amd.
That's one thing that is great about the old mac pro. It has more options than the new one.
I heard rumors doing that Apple was going to offer other GPUs but we'll just have to wait and see. Seems Apple wants to push Open CL instead of Cuda.

HPs and Dells workstations really are amazing, and I agree, Apple is neglecting media creators.

I respect and like Open CL but the fact is CUDA still has more support and legacy applications...if an application needs CUDA then all the AMD in the world doesn't mean anything...but yeah the old Mac Pro gave you more options. Dual GPU's is great for video and photo people like me but rather useless for others who want pure CPU strength....I know allot of people were complaining about that and rightfully so, although CPU tasks are going to be delegated to the GPU in very new and unique ways in the future it just isn't something thats relevent right now for many.

 

[TechGod]

a piece of hardware that can handle a bit more than just casual, low quality games.

You are aware that there are plenty of "hardcore" female gamers correct? What a mysogonistic comment.

 

[Stetrain]

Razer Blade with 870m 17.8mm ;-)

It's totally possible for apple to do better graphics they just don't. It's not the market they're aiming for.

That's true, but the Razer Blade also has a 37W CPU while the 15" Macbook Pro uses 47W CPUs.

It's a trade-off with how much heat you can dissipate and how much battery life you can get out of the form factor.

 

[PatrickVogeli]

980M + 4K display.. yeah!

 

[Gav Mack]

Mac Pro got AMD
iMac got AMD
Next Macbook will get AMD

I reckon you're spot on there.

For OpenCL they are switching to AMD period.

if you want a gaming Mac with a gtx 980 buy a Mac Pro 5,1 single cpu tower upgrade it to hex core, SATA 3 SSD or PCIe using Apples SSD blades and get the real gtx 980 card inside one. Hopefully Nvidia are writing drivers for the 980 as they've been doing so for the Mac Pro with the 780 etc. Over on the Mac Pro forum here and netkas.org 980 support is coming along, though you need a supported card installed first to swap out after you've installed the Nvidia drivers first.

My old 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 with gtx 680 with similar upgrades as above is a superb gaming rig on bootcamp. Most games run flat out at 1920x1200 and 780 cards do it at ACD resolutions.

 

[nateo200]

I reckon you're spot on there.

For OpenCL they are switching to AMD period.

if you want a gaming Mac with a gtx 980 buy a Mac Pro 5,1 single cpu tower upgrade it to hex core, SATA 3 SSD or PCIe using Apples SSD blades and get the real gtx 980 card inside one. Hopefully Nvidia are writing drivers for the 980 as they've been doing so for the Mac Pro with the 780 etc. Over on the Mac Pro forum here and netkas.org 980 support is coming along, though you need a supported card installed first to swap out after you've installed the Nvidia drivers first.

My old 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 with gtx 680 with similar upgrades as above is a superb gaming rig on bootcamp. Most games run flat out at 1920x1200 and 780 cards do it at ACD resolutions.

I think anyone who knows what a GTX 980 is knows about this....there are threads on here about it and one guy has dual GTX 680's on his 2010 or 2011 Mac Pro and it works great...but its a work around...its not a native thing. The older Mac Pro's aren't going to be around forever and the good ones will get snapped up first. I would go with the Single CPU tower with 6-core and a single GTX 680 in a heart beat BTW but I just think its annoying that Apple is moving away from a good thing...

 

[Gav Mack]

I think anyone who knows what a GTX 980 is knows about this....there are threads on here about it and one guy has dual GTX 680's on his 2010 or 2011 Mac Pro and it works great...but its a work around...its not a native thing. The older Mac Pro's aren't going to be around forever and the good ones will get snapped up first. I would go with the Single CPU tower with 6-core and a single GTX 680 in a heart beat BTW but I just think its annoying that Apple is moving away from a good thing...

My pc GTX 680 has been flashed with the EVGA Mac edition eFI bios in bootcamp so in all intents and purposes it is a genuine card. The 780 can be modded by third parties and works out the box and both cards blow away everything bar the Mac Pro 6,1 in gaming resolutions. The 980 is a work in progress, no doubt soon it's going to happen but a trip to www.macvidcards.com can show you just what you can get inside one right now.

To compensate for the speed drop of a single core in a 6 core westmere Xeon cpu (which has a maximum of 3.46 ghz and 48gb ram) you can now install as of very recently a 40 buck PCIe card from China which uses the official Apple SSD blades, including the 1.4gig/second 2nd gen 1tb blade in the Mac Pro 6,1. As that part is 4x PCIe it has twice the I/O performance of the retina Macbook pro and iMac. The 5,1 was always ahead upgraded of its smaller newer brothers overall but this not only closes the gap to the 6,1 but extends it to every other Mac bar single core too. If EVGA release a GTX 980 Mac edition card and we have the ability to flash that Mac bios onto generic PC Cards looks like I will be upgrading my 680 soon and that will toast even the 6,1.

You can buy 5,1 towers pretty cheaply, just over a 1000 bucks and they are super reliable compared to a notebook or all in one, most soldier on way past their last supported OS X version. But it's up to you the user to get the right parts and upgrade it just like a windows gaming rig with options. These models used to have a life as a pro workstation but now, used they are by far the cheapest and best bang per buck genuine gaming rig Mac there is and if you want also the most powerful overall for games depending on your budget. There's no better place on the web to find out exactly what upgrades are required over in the Mac Pro section of these forums.

 

[Zeov]

You are aware that there are plenty of "hardcore" female gamers correct? What a mysogonistic comment.

oh god here we go..

 

[mcarling]

A hypothetical 17" 3840x2160 MBP could reasonably use a discrete GPU. For 15" MBPs, discrete GPUs are at end-of-life. With either Broadwell or Skylake, all 15" MBPs will be free of discrete GPUs and all their problems.