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HD 5000 MBA vs HD 4000 MBP

J

Jayeegii

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 19, 2013
10
0
Australia
i`m gonna buy either macbook pro 13" with retina or macbook air 13" upgraded to i7 with 8gb of ram. I`m a student so i`ll take them sometimes to school and also i play games sometimes such as Dota2, LoL, WoW etc... so which one would be better ? cuz it seems that MBA has HD 5000 which they say it is better than HD 4000 in games and other stuff ? please help me to decide
 
Wait till after next Tuesday. The mbp line is 3 days off an update!
 
So i bought the 13"MBA and a 13" retina rMMP to compare side by side (both 8gb 256GB). The operational speed for them appears to be comparable. Obviously one of the key differences is battery life and the screen.

When watching a movie on Itunes on both the Retina mBP seems TOO dark. Brightness is exactly the same on both machines. Has anyone else experienced this???
 
dizmonk said:
So i bought the 13"MBA and a 13" retina rMMP to compare side by side (both 8gb 256GB). The operational speed for them appears to be comparable. Obviously one of the key differences is battery life and the screen.

When watching a movie on Itunes on both the Retina mBP seems TOO dark. Brightness is exactly the same on both machines. Has anyone else experienced this???
Click to expand...

That's because a retina screen requires more light this is because the panel is more dense.
 
I use a lot of openGL graphics in my projects and the MacBook Air handles them surprising well!

It's not an intensive gaming notebook, but it can play CoD 4 at native res, medium/high graphics at 60fps.
 
They should be similar. ULV chips generally run at reduced clocks vs the 35/45 watt standard voltage chips. HD 4000 ULV was a good bit slower than HD 4000 SV (generally clocks were around 1150-1250 on the SV part depending on the chip and 900-1000 on the ULV part). Moving to HD 4400/5000 should almost close than gap but I would not be surprised if HD 4000 was faster than ULV HD 5000, especially in CPU heavy games where the CPU eats up more tdp budget resulting in less power and lower clocks for the igp.
 
If it's a choice between the 2012 rMBP and 2013 Air for gaming - go for the Air. The HD 5000 destroys the HD 4000, and the better CPU in the rMBP isn't the bottleneck, the GPU is, so the Air will outperform it. Plus, the SSD is faster.

Oh, and since you can't run games at Retina anyways, the 'native' resolution of the Air is higher.
 
thanks

Saltymac said:
Use as a student would seem to be well served with a Mac Book AIR - retina screen uses a lot of battery and for what purpose ?
Click to expand...

I watch movies and sometimes play and usually I do other stuff for school

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mattferg said:
If it's a choice between the 2012 rMBP and 2013 Air for gaming - go for the Air. The HD 5000 destroys the HD 4000, and the better CPU in the rMBP isn't the bottleneck, the GPU is, so the Air will outperform it. Plus, the SSD is faster.

Oh, and since you can't run games at Retina anyways, the 'native' resolution of the Air is higher.
Click to expand...

How about heating ? Air seemed to be heating a lot, thanks for the reply. So i think i should definitely wait for tuesday to check out the new MBP
 
Well even if the rMBP gets update, it won't run games as well due to higher resolution display, but I can see Apple using the more powerful graphics chip on the rMBP compared to the MBA.
 
dizmonk said:
But I find movies and tv shows on Itunes are too dark to see. Is this a common complaint?
Click to expand...

No, not really. The Retina display is far more accurate and which is usually ideal. The reason for what you're seeing is that a) Airs have cheaper display panels and b) video is encoded to a TV standard that is different to computer display standards.

If you're curious, you could google '16-235 color space' (which is the TV standard) and see what makes it different to '0-255 color space' (which is the computer standard).
 
Enrico Pallazzo said:
No, not really. The Retina display is far more accurate and which is usually ideal. The reason for what you're seeing is that a) Airs have cheaper display panels and b) video is encoded to a TV standard that is different to computer display standards.

If you're curious, you could google '16-235 color space' (which is the TV standard) and see what makes it different to '0-255 color space' (which is the computer standard).
Click to expand...

The Retina models have crushed blacks. Calibration helps a lot, but blacks and greys aren't it's strong points.
 
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