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adeelrahman

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 8, 2019
26
3
Is it better or worse? This person is saying the air has the better graphics card?
 

casperes1996

macrumors 604
Jan 26, 2014
7,199
5,161
Horsens, Denmark
That's ridiculous to put it mildly. The Air does not have a "graphics card" btw. I'm being a bit pedantic here, but the GPU is part of the CPU package. An iGPU. The 16" MacBook Pro features Navi GPUs running at a much higher TDP than the CPU and GPU combined in the Air, and the RDNA GPU architecture in the 16" is really really quite good. The Intel iGPU is not even close to competing with that. - That said it probably is better than the 13" MacBook Pro's GPU, so perhaps it's just a slight misunderstanding there.

Having watched some of the video, I can say that what he's talking about isn't the raw performance of the chip but specifically fixed function encoding hardware. Now I still don't think that's actually the case but that is a possibility. A slower chip can still outperform a faster chip in certain tasks if it has specialised fixed function hardware for it. RDNA does have good hardware video blocks though. I don't know much about what the newer Intel video blocks include but keep in mind it's not about the raw speed, just very specific tasks that there are fixed function hardware for. And the MBP's RDNA chip also has fixed function video hardware so the question is just the range of supported codecs and options as well as the frame-throughput. The 16" is faster overall by a lot


Also he says in the video that the two Thunderbolt ports means you can "turbo charge" it. Do not plug several power adapters into it. That can break things. If there's protection for it it'll do nothing but that's best case. Worst case is breakage. Faster charging should be a higher wattager charger, not using several ports.
 

JTToft

macrumors 68040
Apr 27, 2010
3,447
796
Aarhus, Denmark
Do not plug several power adapters into it. That can break things. If there's protection for it it'll do nothing but that's best case. Worst case is breakage.
- Where are you getting that? The message from Apple regarding their USB-C machines has always been that if several power adaptors are plugged in, the system will ignore all but the most suitable one.

 

casperes1996

macrumors 604
Jan 26, 2014
7,199
5,161
Horsens, Denmark
- Where are you getting that? The message from Apple regarding their USB-C machines has always been that if several power adaptors are plugged in, the system will ignore all but the most suitable one.


"Ignore all but the most suitable one". As I said, if there's protection against it, it'll do nothing. But worst case it can break things. My statement was general and I felt properly signified that I wasn't sure if Apple specifically had or did not have protection for it. So my statement is still correct :)
That said I have seen a YT video with a 4 port MacBook Pro, where plugging a power adapter into all four did fry the charging circuit.
 

ScreenSavers

macrumors 68020
Feb 26, 2016
2,105
1,638
Bloomingdale, GA
- Where are you getting that? The message from Apple regarding their USB-C machines has always been that if several power adaptors are plugged in, the system will ignore all but the most suitable one.


I saw an everythingapplepro video years ago where he tried that and busted the charging ability. Be safe and don’t do it.
 

padams35

macrumors 6502
Nov 10, 2016
438
281
Is it better or worse? This person is saying the air has the better graphics card?

Worse. You have to go back to 2015 to find a 15" slower than the new Air. (Notebookcheck.com is predicting the i3's iris graphics will be a bit faster than the Iris Pro 5200 while the i7's iris graphics are projected to be faster than the R9 M370X but not quite as fast as the Radeon Pro 450.)
 
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