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Is the HD4000 underpowered for retina screen?
- Thread starter bobbydd21
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Reading comprehension? The previous poster said the 650m was forced to be used.
As you said, both 13" and 15" lag the very same way. What do they have in common? HD4000
Some issues have been reported when using gfxCardStatus with retina... Anyway, you are claiming the 650m lags, but does it lag only with applications that use WebKit rendering engine such as Safari and Chrome, or do you claim it lags also with applications that do not make use of webkit engine?
It's likely a driver issue if there is a problem. The HD 4000 like the HD 3000 can drive a thunderbolt display or the cinema display of equivalent resolution that preceded it without the pixel doubling applied to the rmbp models.
As you said, both 13" and 15" lag the very same way. What do they have in common? HD4000
Some issues have been reported when using gfxCardStatus with retina... Anyway, you are claiming the 650m lags, but does it lag only with applications that use WebKit rendering engine such as Safari and Chrome, or do you claim it lags also with applications that do not make use of webkit engine?
They also have in common all the software -.-'
Don't say that it doesn't lag. It does lag. I would be more upset if I visited websites or used apps that lag more than others but the lag IS there.
For the ones that say there is no lag, open the Contacts app, reduce the window size to a small one and then hit the zoom button (green one). Now come back here and say there is no lag.
For the ones that say there is no lag, open the Contacts app, reduce the window size to a small one and then hit the zoom button (green one). Now come back here and say there is no lag.
Lag or not, the HD4000 is a crappy graphics solution to have by itself for anything other than basic web surfing and office work. If you don't run any graphically intensive software its probably going to be fine especially when mavricks is released. But if you use it for anything "pro" related like editing/animation studio software its going to disappoint. Apple chose to break the market with the retina displaysrather than wait for gpu that was capable of pushing that screen with pro apps.
The HD 4000 is still the fastest one that has ever been in a 13" MBP.
When Nvidia came with the 9400M they all said how great it is. Then came the 320M which was a game changer from the 9400M and people were even happy to be able to play games. Now the 320M barely beats the HD 3000 convincingly and stands no chance against a HD 4000 especially with the new drivers.
With HD 4600 little changed in architecture and synthetic benchmarks but games made quite a big jump from the HD 4000.
On the desktop UI side the workload hasn't really changed all that much from the 9400M days. It is a very capable gpu for most stuff people do.
People that actually do serious pro stuff editing/animations software scene are for one very very few and it really is their own fault for not buying notebooks with the right hardware. There are GPUs specifically optimized for that stuff.
It is a thin 13" notebook after all. One can see on the AMD APU side that even a company with much better GPU history than Intel struggles to deliver any more performance in that power envelope with shared system memory. Anybody that buys a notebook for pro rendering tasks is an idiot or should at least go for some more mobile workstation. Otherwise for normal stuff the GPU should be just fine. Considering what game engines can do on that hardware or what mobile OSs can do with much much weaker hardware and sort of performance problem is really more software than anything else in the 2D GUI space. This whole idea of ever throwing more hardware at a problem rather than fixing software is one Microsoft employed for too long. Today Microsoft had a much better and more performant idea of how to get high detailed icons, bitmaps and stuff on a ultra high def screen with good performance. Apple seems to know work like MS used to. Hardware is getting faster anyway so lets just program our stuff anyway we like too it will eventually work well. Like Vista, that eventually worked just fine too.
When Nvidia came with the 9400M they all said how great it is. Then came the 320M which was a game changer from the 9400M and people were even happy to be able to play games. Now the 320M barely beats the HD 3000 convincingly and stands no chance against a HD 4000 especially with the new drivers.
With HD 4600 little changed in architecture and synthetic benchmarks but games made quite a big jump from the HD 4000.
On the desktop UI side the workload hasn't really changed all that much from the 9400M days. It is a very capable gpu for most stuff people do.
People that actually do serious pro stuff editing/animations software scene are for one very very few and it really is their own fault for not buying notebooks with the right hardware. There are GPUs specifically optimized for that stuff.
It is a thin 13" notebook after all. One can see on the AMD APU side that even a company with much better GPU history than Intel struggles to deliver any more performance in that power envelope with shared system memory. Anybody that buys a notebook for pro rendering tasks is an idiot or should at least go for some more mobile workstation. Otherwise for normal stuff the GPU should be just fine. Considering what game engines can do on that hardware or what mobile OSs can do with much much weaker hardware and sort of performance problem is really more software than anything else in the 2D GUI space. This whole idea of ever throwing more hardware at a problem rather than fixing software is one Microsoft employed for too long. Today Microsoft had a much better and more performant idea of how to get high detailed icons, bitmaps and stuff on a ultra high def screen with good performance. Apple seems to know work like MS used to. Hardware is getting faster anyway so lets just program our stuff anyway we like too it will eventually work well. Like Vista, that eventually worked just fine too.
As you said, both 13" and 15" lag the very same way. What do they have in common? HD4000
Some issues have been reported when using gfxCardStatus with retina... Anyway, you are claiming the 650m lags, but does it lag only with applications that use WebKit rendering engine such as Safari and Chrome, or do you claim it lags also with applications that do not make use of webkit engine?
As said, both machines share the same software.
And gfxCardStatus has problems forcing only the HD4000 because OSX overrides it and force the 650M with certain things. Like, say, connect an external display, and the 650M is the only thing that's in use.
Forcing the 650M is not that hard, though. Just disable Automatic Graphics Switching within Preferences under Power Saving. No need to go through gfxCardStatus.
And yeah, the machine does lag where Webkit is not used. Try 10,000+ lines of codes in XCode. Or a 2GB vector PDF in Preview.
In fact, that 2GB vector PDF in Preview lags on ALL of the Mac computers I have used thus far. Including the 2013 27" iMac that's supposedly the most powerful of the bunch. It's all in the software. It's not just Retina.
My 15" has the discrete graphics processor but probably 95% of the time the machine's using the HD 4000 graphics. I've never seen a problem with it.
If you plan to do HD video or photo work then I'd say the HD 4000 is underpowered. Apple has the GT 650M in the 15" rMBP for people who have those needs.
If you plan to do HD video or photo work then I'd say the HD 4000 is underpowered. Apple has the GT 650M in the 15" rMBP for people who have those needs.
Umm, didn't Anandtech (and I seem to remember several other sites) addressed this months ago? Lag on Retina devices is primarily a software issue:
Remember the 13" MBP has significantly slower single core performance than the 15" model so the issues that do exist in Mountain Lion are more obvious on the 13" rMBP. Problem was when the machine first came out and there were issues many of the tech blogs did their usual stellar job and dove straight to the nearest conclusion without doing any real fact checking first. With Mavericks being reported to run considerably better on rMBP's the logical conclusion is that a) Apple has moved more of the UI workload to the GPU and b) improved the efficiency of the UI routines. That's not to say you will never notice lag, the current hardware is still being pushed hard and I'd be amazed if they could solve everything in software. But I'd expect them to reach a point where the vast majority of users would be happy.
Ultimately the HD4000 is a bit underpowered if you're going to be gaming or playing around with HD video. It really isn't an issue when it comes to general use and Mavericks is almost certain to see a major jump forward in this area.
Remember the 13" MBP has significantly slower single core performance than the 15" model so the issues that do exist in Mountain Lion are more obvious on the 13" rMBP. Problem was when the machine first came out and there were issues many of the tech blogs did their usual stellar job and dove straight to the nearest conclusion without doing any real fact checking first. With Mavericks being reported to run considerably better on rMBP's the logical conclusion is that a) Apple has moved more of the UI workload to the GPU and b) improved the efficiency of the UI routines. That's not to say you will never notice lag, the current hardware is still being pushed hard and I'd be amazed if they could solve everything in software. But I'd expect them to reach a point where the vast majority of users would be happy.
Ultimately the HD4000 is a bit underpowered if you're going to be gaming or playing around with HD video. It really isn't an issue when it comes to general use and Mavericks is almost certain to see a major jump forward in this area.
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Sounds like jealousy. I am pretty sure you can get any computer to lag. I can walk into any best buy play with any computer and regardless of price it will lag somewhere. If anything the rMBP is the least laggy of any machine I have ever owned. I convert lots of video with tune4mac and the process on my 2013 MBA took over two hours and only 1 to 1 1/2 on my rMBP. I haven't noticed anything that would even hint that the machine is not capable of doing what I want it to do. And it does it with the best screen offered on any laptop.
I have used both 13 and 15 inch MacBooks and neither exhibit any lag... People like to hammer the last generation to justify their wait for the next generation... I noticed the 15" had better performance with graphics rendering but not so as to make the 13" look laggy.
Be proud of your 13 or 15 inch machine you already have... Their may not even be any performance gains with the new Haswell chipset. Especially if the Air is anything to go by...
AC
The more efficient way to avoid lags is to close all applications except the browser, keep only one tab pointing to Macrumors forum, and just stare with wide-eyed gaze at your crispy retina display... well until someone states rMBP lags, then reply saying "I haven't noticed any lag, mine is smooth as butter...", then loop again...
The more efficient way to avoid lags is to close all applications except the browser, keep only one tab pointing to Macrumors forum, and just stare with wide-eyed gaze at your crispy retina display... well until someone states rMBP lags, then reply saying "I haven't noticed any lag, mine is smooth as butter...", then loop again...
Or I can return it for a MBA that looks and acts exactly as it did in 2007. Or I can just state truth and not a regurgitate what I heard someone else say on a forum filled with hypochondriacs fussing about lag if you do a certain function in exactly the same way they just did.
have motion/fcp open with safari and firefox and around 5 tabs open. No lags here. Pretty much happy with my decision to buy the retina. It exports pro res hq vids like a rocket!
on my older mbp 13 inch whenever i needed to give it in for service id remove the 8gb ram i put in and get the original 4gb back in and boy would it begin to lag. So maybe i could say ram could also be on reason for lags
on my older mbp 13 inch whenever i needed to give it in for service id remove the 8gb ram i put in and get the original 4gb back in and boy would it begin to lag. So maybe i could say ram could also be on reason for lags
I had a Haswell MBA (HD5000) with the i7 and 8GB of RAM. I returned it and bought a 13" rMBP with the i7 instead. So far, the HD4000 in the rMBP is outperforming the HD5000 in the MBA, especially on Starcraft 2.
Yes, when there is not enough ram for an active process, OS X will swap inactive processes memory to disk, and this swapping process is costly on non-SSD disks. That's likely the reason of lag on your cMBP.
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The HD4000 cannot and will not outperform the Iris 5000.
Actually it can and it does occasionally. In Starcraft 2 almost definitely by a big margin.
The thing is the HD 4000 shows in 35 and 45W CPUs. It generally runs at full turbo.
The HD 5000 shows its face only in 15W ULV chips and will hit its turbo rarely and not for long. In many games like i.e. Starcraft 2 an HD 4000 powered rMBP will do better than a HD 5000 simply because these games are CPU limited anyway in any bigger multiplayer game and for medium settings the HD 4000 will be enough the rest is just cpu. In starcraft getting 25fps out of a GPU is easy but out of a dual core cpu on a map with more than two players isn't.
If you compare the Hd 4600 to the HD 5000 the former is generally better because the HD 5000 only pulls ahead in fps where the frame rate is unplayable anyway. CPU limitation is a thing and AMD can sing a song about it.
1st person shooters are often forgiving but not all of them and there are more games. Benchmarks quite often don't really hit the cpu intensive battles.
The HD 5000 has way more potential but that is just wasted if there isn't enough work for it because the cpu cannot keep up or because the cpu needs too much of the total TDP.
A 5100 is a different story as that one will have about double the TDP to work with.
Hope that Apple does not look at the issue just like you did or we would be screwed.
We have to compare 2012 MBA with HD4000 vs 2013 MBA with HD5000
A Historical Look at MacBook Air GPU Performance