How does Iris Pro designate Video Memory from System Memory? Are discrete video cards a thing of the past?
They aren't entirely a thing of the past. They are becoming less common in Apple machines, especially notebooks. Any of these options are still a fraction of the speed of a desktop 780.
I will be mostly using the Adobe Creative Suite. On occasion I want to play a game, but nothing crazy. Will see what the next update brings. I just don't want to spend over 2000+
What would you suggest I sell my 2010 15" Macbook Pro for (specs below)?.
I don't know what you'll get for the 2010. You should be fine with Creative Suite. Can you elaborate what you use most? Keep in mind this topic has come up many times before, so there's a lot of good information in the older threads.
I guess my understanding of video cards is very minimal. These new cards that can take system ram and access as much as they please compared to discrete video cards. I just don't understand how they work vs a video card with its own discrete ram.
You don't need to understand all of it, and there is no chance of gaining any real insight through a few forum replies. Integrated graphics are nothing new. There is some cap imposed somewhere, at least by the OS as to what they are allowed to consume, but that isn't terribly important. If you want to see gaming benchmarks, you should try
barefeats. They do a lot of comparisons. Their methods aren't always what I would consider perfect, but they do give an indication of how the tests are run. If you look through older threads, you'll also find a lot of anecdotal framerates from other people on recent macbook pros. Iris pro will be slower, but I'm skeptical on the idea of paying that much more for the 750m unless you were also planning to buy some of the other cto options that are included at that level anyway. Otherwise for gaming I would probably just go with the 2012 refurbished, which costs quite a bit less at this point. The 750m is the same card used in that one. It's just clocked higher and has more vram, so it can load bigger textures without stuttering assuming that is the only performance bottleneck.
So with the current Iris Pro, it is ideal in most situations. The discrete GPU such as the GT 750M w/ 2GB would only really be needed for the Hardcore gamer or 3D rendering.
I won't see a difference in everyday tasks and Adobe Creative Suite. Correct?
3D rendering isn't gpu reliant aside from a couple renderers. Even then NONE of the gpus offered on any Mac are supported with a couple after market exceptions on older Mac Pros, and even then only if you boot into Windows or Linux. This is one of those misconceptions that people keep passing around on the internet because it sounds like it should be true. The reason offline rendering isn't run by sets of gpus in spite of its parallel nature relates mostly to memory subsystems. Older renderers relied on things such as formats that could easily be read to virtual memory swap space without first being loaded into ram due to the amount of texture data that may be loaded for a single object or shader stack. Fully programmable gpu pipelines were also unavailable when the use of CG really started to take off, but you don't really need to understand any of this, and it's way beyond the scope of a forum post.
Anyway I wouldn't recommend the 750m for hardcore gaming or anything really taxing in OpenGL. If you wanted maximum power, I wouldn't recommend a notebook just because desktop gpus offer so much more. The two aren't even close, so past a certain point the answer is neither. You want to play current generation games at max settings. Answer is neither. You want to move around several million polygons with shading without dropping below 24fps, answer is neither.
Any current gpu is fine for that. Older integrated graphics may be slower specifically on functions that are overloaded with OpenCL counterparts (meaning they use OpenCL if available, otherwise use other code). This isn't something you'll run into constantly anyway. Most people don't have a workflow that involves on long stream of filters, and if they have that, they apply it in Lightroom where gpus are completely meaningless.
But you are essentially correct, except that GPU is rarely utilised for 3D rendering. Some newer versions of 3D software support OpenCL acceleration for rendering, and Iris Pro should fare very well there. I am not aware of any benchmarks though.
