So I’m trying to find a laptop to essentially play 4K videos smoothly while on the go. The thing is, I want the experience to be flawless. Is the G7 graphics of the i7 MacBook Air exactly the same power as the 2020 1799$ 10th gen MacBook Pro ? It seems weird to me that both share the same integrated GPU but they seem to be Both at 300 MHZ if I’m not wrong and the TDP doesn’t affect the GPU performance, does it ? Thanks for your help
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Is the G7 GPU of the i7 MacBook Air the same as the 1799$ 10th gen MacBook Pro ?
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TDP does sort of affect GPU performance, yes; As does memory bandwidth, but let's step back a bit here.
You're looking at smooth video playback of 4K files. Playback, not editing or anything like that, yeah? - You actually don't need to look at the compute power of the GPUs; You need to look at the media decode blocks and check if your intended codecs have hardware acceleration. Because if they do it doesn't matter how powerful the GPU is, there will be dedicated hardware in the chip just for video and the GPU won't need to compute it in a traditional sense.
You're looking at smooth video playback of 4K files. Playback, not editing or anything like that, yeah? - You actually don't need to look at the compute power of the GPUs; You need to look at the media decode blocks and check if your intended codecs have hardware acceleration. Because if they do it doesn't matter how powerful the GPU is, there will be dedicated hardware in the chip just for video and the GPU won't need to compute it in a traditional sense.
Yeah you’re completely right thanks. Well I checked and it turns out 10th gen CPUs do have H265 and VP9 hardware decoding, which should be perfect for me. However, macOS still doesn’t support VP9 hardware decoding right ? I mean I think that the reason Chrome is still such a battery hog is it does software decoding. Moreover I forgot to say I do use FFMPEG/Handbrake to convert 4K videos but I only know of GPU accélération with NVidia so I don’t think the GPU is important for that ?
I don't actually know what Chrome does, but macOS doesn't have VP9 acceleration with Apple's programs, but I don't actually know if it's possible to use the media block on the GPU (integrated or not) for VP9 outside of Apple's AVFoundation framework. But H.265 shouldn't be an issue at least; And the T2 can even do a lot of H.265
Last I used Handbrake it was CPU only on my machine at least
Handbrake does have access now to the T2 via the Video Toolbox. There are presets that activate hardware acceleration via that method.