MBA 13 inch, 1.6 vs 2.2. Real world differences?

[motrek]

So basically, the added graphics power of the pro is really just enough to push around all the extra pixels correct?

Yes and no. For most people this is probably the only benefit they would see from it.

The faster GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) will accelerate 3-D stuff like video games and 3-D modeling software, and it can also be used for certain scientific computing and certain photo/video filters.

If you don't play graphics-intensive 3-D video games and you haven't heard of OpenCL then you'll probably see minimal benefit from a faster GPU, if any.

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Yep. I would say if the iGPU has its own 2-3GB dedicated VRAM, this wouldn't be an issue at all. On windoze, even a HD4000 graphics can do scaled 4K @ 30Hz without lag since it cheats by magnifying the display and font dpi rather than actual scaling like on OS X. No extra GPU VRAM and usage is needed unlike OS X

I have no idea what you're talking about. What wouldn't be an issue? And what in the world would need 2 or 3GB of VRAM?

Maybe you're talking about the fact that OS X renders everything at twice the logical resolution and then scales it down to the screen resolution. This has (almost) nothing to do with how much RAM is devoted to anything. If this is faster or slower it's because of the speed of the RAM and the scaling hardware in the GPU.

 

[DJinTX]

Well I went to the Apple store to reassess pro vs air. The retina does look better than i remember from my last trip. But I will also say that the Air screen is very good too. Definitely not the "ugly TN panel" that many here refer to it as. I could be happy with it. And the pro is not as slim as the air, but it is close enough. Not sure what I'm going to do, but I feel a decision is imminent. I just have to decide retina vs better battery. Its so hard because I want both top end specs. Of course i can't so i have to choose. I'm leaning toward the pro. Its just so hard to give up 2 hrs of battery life.

 

[motrek]

Well I went to the Apple store to reassess pro vs air. The retina does look better than i remember from my last trip. But I will also say that the Air screen is very good too. Definitely not the "ugly TN panel" that many here refer to it as. I could be happy with it. And the pro is not as slim as the air, but it is close enough. Not sure what I'm going to do, but I feel a decision is imminent. I just have to decide retina vs better battery. Its so hard because I want both top end specs. Of course i can't so i have to choose. I'm leaning toward the pro. Its just so hard to give up 2 hrs of battery life.

I guess I don't know what your situation is but the rMBP still gives you 9+ hours of battery life. I can't really imagine needing to run on battery power for any longer than that. Even if I'm on a transcontinental flight I spend some of the time sleeping and eating, I'm not using my laptop the whole time.

 

[DJinTX]

I guess I don't know what your situation is but the rMBP still gives you 9+ hours of battery life. I can't really imagine needing to run on battery power for any longer than that. Even if I'm on a transcontinental flight I spend some of the time sleeping and eating, I'm not using my laptop the whole time.

It's not that I particularly require exactly 12 hours instead of 10, it's just that after 3-4 years of usage battery life will have decreased a huge amount and will be one of my biggest complaints. I keep my macs a very long time, 6.5 yrs for my current macbook. In any case its hard not to go for the 20% increase now to minimize this future issue as much as possible.

 

[cbautis2]

Yes and no. For most people this is probably the only benefit they would see from it.

The faster GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) will accelerate 3-D stuff like video games and 3-D modeling software, and it can also be used for certain scientific computing and certain photo/video filters.

If you don't play graphics-intensive 3-D video games and you haven't heard of OpenCL then you'll probably see minimal benefit from a faster GPU, if any.

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I have no idea what you're talking about. What wouldn't be an issue? And what in the world would need 2 or 3GB of VRAM?

Maybe you're talking about the fact that OS X renders everything at twice the logical resolution and then scales it down to the screen resolution. This has (almost) nothing to do with how much RAM is devoted to anything. If this is faster or slower it's because of the speed of the RAM and the scaling hardware in the GPU.

The scaling part requires extra vram and speed of ram and gpu core speed. The issue is there's no dedicated ram for GPU and this uses system ram which is slower than gddr5. If there's a lot of active apps (e.g. 20 apps and browsers) and you keep switching between them through mission control, the lack of dedicated vram and gddr5 speed will be apparent. No matter how fast the core clock it won't matter if the ram speed and capacity are bottlenecking

 

[DJinTX]

The scaling part requires extra vram and speed of ram and gpu core speed. The issue is there's no dedicated ram for GPU and this uses system ram which is slower than gddr5. If there's a lot of active apps (e.g. 20 apps and browsers) and you keep switching between them through mission control, the lack of dedicated vram and gddr5 speed will be apparent. No matter how fast the core clock it won't matter if the ram speed and capacity are bottlenecking

Sorry, I'm not as technically experienced as you so I'm not sure what is the disagreement is. Are you arguing that the pro is better than the air afterall and the improvements aren't just enough to operate the retina?

 

[motrek]

It's not that I particularly require exactly 12 hours instead of 10, it's just that after 3-4 years of usage battery life will have decreased a huge amount and will be one of my biggest complaints. I keep my macs a very long time, 6.5 yrs for my current macbook. In any case its hard not to go for the 20% increase now to minimize this future issue as much as possible.

You might be surprised. I had my last MBA for 4 years and when I sold it, it still had 90% of its original battery capacity. Granted I ran it plugged in almost all the time but I still had a few hundred cycles on the battery and it was still in very good shape.

The other thing is that you can get Apple to replace the battery for a little over $100, so if you do decide that your battery has lost too much capacity, there's an easy fix that won't break the bank.

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The scaling part requires extra vram and speed of ram and gpu core speed. The issue is there's no dedicated ram for GPU and this uses system ram which is slower than gddr5. If there's a lot of active apps (e.g. 20 apps and browsers) and you keep switching between them through mission control, the lack of dedicated vram and gddr5 speed will be apparent. No matter how fast the core clock it won't matter if the ram speed and capacity are bottlenecking

You're not making sense about any of this.

1) Scaling speed has nothing to do with amount of VRAM. You have a big image and you're scaling it down to a small image. This takes a fixed amount of time. It doesn't matter if you're scaling one app down, or another app, or a big picture of a turtle.

2) If you're switching between 20 apps like a crazy monkey trying to reach some VRAM limit, then yeah, maybe you're going to reach it. That has nothing to do with whether or not you have dedicated VRAM. In fact, if you had dedicated VRAM, you would likely reach that limit sooner. Intel's integrated GPUs can use over a gigabyte of main memory for graphics which is more than most laptops with discrete GPUs and dedicated VRAM.

 

[cbautis2]

Sorry, I'm not as technically experienced as you so I'm not sure what is the disagreement is. Are you arguing that the pro is better than the air afterall and the improvements aren't just enough to operate the retina?

Iris 5100/6100 is basically an overclocked HD5000/6000 and what's lacking is the dedicated 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM that allows smoother scaling when tens of tabs and lots of apps are running and you're multitasking using mission control. The reason is that system RAM is also consuming random read/write speed and capacity for other apps aside from the graphics. That's one the reasons why animations slow down after too many apps are cached in RAM. The core speed of HD4000 or later is enough to run scaled retina but it bottlenecks when the system ram is very busy and/or nearing full capacity.

 

[motrek]

Iris 5100/6100 is basically an overclocked HD5000/6000 and what's lacking is the dedicated 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM that allows smoother scaling when tens of tabs and lots of apps are running and you're multitasking using mission control. The reason is that system RAM is also consuming random read/write speed and capacity for other apps aside from the graphics. That's one the reasons why animations slow down after too many apps are cached in RAM. The core speed of HD4000 or later is enough to run scaled retina but it bottlenecks when the system ram is very busy and/or nearing full capacity.

You need to stop posting to this thread because all of your "technical" information is wrong and nonsensical and all you're doing is confusing the OP.

GDDR5 doesn't have anything to do with anything. No system with Intel integrated graphics has any GDDR anywhere. You might be thinking of Crystalwell which is an on-package dedicated eDRAM cache which can effectively be used as VRAM. Even that is 128MB, not 2GB.

Please read this before posting again. It has a lot of good information.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested

 

[DJinTX]

You need to stop posting to this thread because all of your "technical" information is wrong and nonsensical and all you're doing is confusing the OP.

Yes, it was confusing, but so much of it went over my head it didn't even make enough sense to sway my decision. . Thanks for all of the help everyone. I haven't pulled the trigger yet but I am about 97% set on the rMBP/8gb/256gb.

 

[JacksoN123123]

I orderd my i7 8 gb air 2015 ;-) hope to get it soon

 

[cbautis2]

You need to stop posting to this thread because all of your "technical" information is wrong and nonsensical and all you're doing is confusing the OP.

GDDR5 doesn't have anything to do with anything. No system with Intel integrated graphics has any GDDR anywhere. You might be thinking of Crystalwell which is an on-package dedicated eDRAM cache which can effectively be used as VRAM. Even that is 128MB, not 2GB.

Please read this before posting again. It has a lot of good information.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested

It's still a fact that integrated steals from system RAM which makes latency and bandwidth a lot lower than discrete graphics. Iris Pro is miles ahead of integrated graphics in memory bandwidth due to edram. It can also be due to software code inefficiency since on Windoze, 200% hi dpi 4k scaling with office, flash video, ie metro/desktop on a frigging HD4000 graphics is silky smooth.

 

[motrek]

It's still a fact that integrated steals from system RAM which makes latency and bandwidth a lot lower than discrete graphics. Iris Pro is miles ahead of integrated graphics in memory bandwidth due to edram. It can also be due to software code inefficiency since on Windoze, 200% hi dpi 4k scaling with office, flash video, ie metro/desktop on a frigging HD4000 graphics is silky smooth.

That's nice but the 13" rMBP doesn't have Iris Pro graphics anyway, just as it doesn't have discrete graphics with the dedicated VRAM you've been talking about.

I think you must be thinking of a 15" rMBP?

 

[cbautis2]

That's nice but the 13" rMBP doesn't have Iris Pro graphics anyway, just as it doesn't have discrete graphics with the dedicated VRAM you've been talking about.

I think you must be thinking of a 15" rMBP?

I'm just pointing out that the jump from HD5000/6000 to Iris 6000/6100 is as dramatic as some people claim since it's just a higher clocked HD5000/6000 and both use system RAM. However, Iris Pro is in another class due to edram making the effective memory bandwidth as good as a dgpu while having more EU and TDP than Iris/HD graphics.

I do believe that iGPUs today are plenty enough to get silky smooth UI hi dpi performance but even the fastest GPU would crawl on its knees if the software is badly optimized or full of bugs.

 

[DJinTX]

I feel a little insane at this point. I haven't pulled the trigger on the rMBP yet as I keep thinking about the MBA, and flip-flopping. From what everyone here says performance of the 2 will be very similar, so the main factors I have to choose between are retina, vs. longer battery life and the lighter more portable form factor. Such a hard decision. I worry a bit about the retina display coating issues I have read about. Also in general, seems like the more bells and whistles you have the more things that can malfunction. Maybe this is less true with the rMBA vs MBA comparison. I will have AppleCare, but I still want to minimize issues if I can. Finally, my last concern is related to heat and fans. I had the original iMac G5, and just had a chronic fan issue that Apple was never able to fix. They ran most of the time under barely any activity and were annoying. Apple tried to fix, but eventually decreed it to be in spec. I could have thrown a fit I guess, but I just got tired of dealing with it. After dealing with it for 3 years I had to get rid of it long before it should have ceased being useful. In any case, I'm gunshy about fan issues as you can tell.

 

[motrek]

I feel a little insane at this point. I haven't pulled the trigger on the rMBP yet as I keep thinking about the MBA, and flip-flopping. From what everyone here says performance of the 2 will be very similar, so the main factors I have to choose between are retina, vs. longer battery life and the lighter more portable form factor. Such a hard decision. I worry a bit about the retina display coating issues I have read about. Also in general, seems like the more bells and whistles you have the more things that can malfunction. Maybe this is less true with the rMBA vs MBA comparison. I will have AppleCare, but I still want to minimize issues if I can. Finally, my last concern is related to heat and fans. I had the original iMac G5, and just had a chronic fan issue that Apple was never able to fix. They ran most of the time under barely any activity and were annoying. Apple tried to fix, but eventually decreed it to be in spec. I could have thrown a fit I guess, but I just got tired of dealing with it. After dealing with it for 3 years I had to get rid of it long before it should have ceased being useful. In any case, I'm gunshy about fan issues as you can tell.

The fans in MacBooks always run at a nominal speed (1200 RPM now for MBAs) but this is basically silent. I'm extremely sensitive to noise like this and I can't hear my MBA's fan unless I'm literally 2 inches away from it. With processors these days being so power efficient, the fan rarely spins much faster. Maybe if you're playing a video game or something and maxing out CPU and GPU use, the fan would be annoying.

Personally I would choose between the 11" MBA and 13" rMBP. The 13" MBA has a larger footprint than the rMBP and doesn't weigh much less.

I have the 11" and I love it.

EDIT: the fans are quiet enough that a lot of people I've met, and on this forum, are pretty sure MacBooks don't have fans or that the fan usually isn't spinning at all. So, it's quiet.

 

[DJinTX]

The fans in MacBooks always run at a nominal speed (1200 RPM now for MBAs) but this is basically silent. I'm extremely sensitive to noise like this and I can't hear my MBA's fan unless I'm literally 2 inches away from it. With processors these days being so power efficient, the fan rarely spins much faster. Maybe if you're playing a video game or something and maxing out CPU and GPU use, the fan would be annoying.

Personally I would choose between the 11" MBA and 13" rMBP. The 13" MBA has a larger footprint than the rMBP and doesn't weigh much less.

I have the 11" and I love it.

EDIT: the fans are quiet enough that a lot of people I've met, and on this forum, are pretty sure MacBooks don't have fans or that the fan usually isn't spinning at all. So, it's quiet.

This is good info. The 11in MBA is a bit too small for me, but glad to hear that fans really shouldn't be an issue with the Airs or 13 inch pros. At this point I think I am just over-analyzing it all. In order to save tax and maybe even get a little price break I will probably buy through MacMall which adds a layer to the process. Since I can't just decide and then go pick it up at the Apple store, I have more time to obsess. And I'm a bit leary of buying online in case there are shipping or delivery issues. If there are then it adds more delay and annoyance, and so I am also procrastinating the decision because of this.

 

[DJinTX]

In case anyone out there is interested or just prefers closure, I finally pulled the trigger and went with the MacBook Pro 13inch early 2015/8GB/256. Loving it. It Feels thinner than I expected and is super fast (I'm upgrading from the late 2008 macbook unibody, so of course it feels fast). But yes, loving it. You cant beat a 15 second boot time. Force touch trackpad is very cool. I would love the MBA battery life, but this is the only compromise I had to make. Very happy. Now i can sleep at night again.

 

[Ny tdi]

i7 MBA has practically as much processing power as i5 rMBP 13".

i5 MBA is 15-20% slower. For your usage even Core M should suffice, it's only that i7 is ever so slightly more future proof and it can be enjoying just to think and know that it has the same processing power as the bulky (in comparison) rMBP 13" lol. And of course graphics are faster, given that iGPU doesn't have to deal with retina reoslution.

Smoger is rights about the i7 MacBook Air being very fast, but he's wrong about HOW fast it is.

The i7 air is FASTER than the 2.7ghz i5 13" rmbp. Thats right: faster. The i7 macbook air is also 25% faster than the base 1.6ghz macbook air. Those are some pretty good numbers from an ultra portable. Wouldnt you agree?



See here: http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2015/03/macbook-air-pro-benchmarks-march-2015/