My first week with my rMBP, and my thoughts on the purchase

[joer80]

Thanks, I won't be doing any heavy workloads or gaming in the virtual machine but will use some specific tools and apps for work which aren't available in osx. Will give parallels a try on the 8gb retina and see how it goes.

Just be aware it may mess up your drivers. I would recommend starting with vmware.

I even tried uninstalling parallels, and also the parallels tools, and reinstalling my bootcamp drivers, and it didn't help. Had to wipe machine..

 

[katmeef]

Just be aware it may mess up your drivers. I would recommend starting with vmware.

Thanks, you mean the drivers on the bootcamp partition right? I'm probably not going to make a separate bootcamp partition and will exclusively run it through virtualization so hopefully should be ok.

 

[joer80]

Thanks, you mean the drivers on the bootcamp partition right? I'm probably not going to make a separate bootcamp partition and will exclusively run it through virtualization so hopefully should be ok.

Yeah, that should be fine.

 

[joer80]

Ok guys. I had a bit of time to do some skyrim testing. I did not have my mouse with me, so I appologize for the bad trackpad jerkyness, but I was able to download fraps and verify I was getting 60 frames per second in high quality at 1680x1050. 8x aa and 8x af.

Here is a youtube video I had fraps record of me taking out a few villagers in whiterun. (Got a few kill cams also.)

Skyrim on entry level Retina Macbook Pro (rMBP) with FRAPS - YouTube

 

[peterb69]

(I run by default in the best for retina, and switch to high rez only when I am doing a layout in photoshop.)

Thanks for all this info joer80. I am looking at same baseline rMBP and will be using it with Photoshop CS5/6 & Lightroom 4. I also have concerns about these 2 programs being scaled until retina updates come out (whenever that is).

So working on a photo in photoshop, what is your experience? Any annoyances in the high rez mode?

Thanks

 

[Eric8199]

What are you using as a file server? That is my biggest fear for the new Pro is that I stream movies to my Apple TV (have about 500gb of them) and I don't want to have to connect an external hard drive every time I want to watch a movie.

 

[joer80]

What are you using as a file server? That is my biggest fear for the new Pro is that I stream movies to my Apple TV (have about 500gb of them) and I don't want to have to connect an external hard drive every time I want to watch a movie.

I bought an ibuypower gaming computer off walmarts website and had it shipped for free to my local walmart. (April 2011.)

So over a year ago it came with a 3 gigahertz dual core amd processor with a 500 gig hard drive, a low end dedicated gpu, and for about $399. (Motherboard is upgradable to 6 core.)

The low end gpu had an hdmi out, so I hooked it to my TV so I can use it as a monitor for ripping things. (You can also remote in using vnc.)

Then I got on new egg, and ordered a 1.5 terrabyte low power hard drive for about $80 and a high quality power supply for about $40. Makes it much more quiet...

This combo gave me a tower with great ventilation and plenty of hard drive space, and if I want to, I can swap out the gpu for a $100 better GPU and game on it.

There is about a 5 to 10 second delay before the movie starts for buffer, if I open a movie on my desktop from my macbook, but it works great because apple tv can grab stuff from the same spot.

 

[joer80]

Thanks for all this info joer80. I am looking at same baseline rMBP and will be using it with Photoshop CS5/6 & Lightroom 4. I also have concerns about these 2 programs being scaled until retina updates come out (whenever that is).

So working on a photo in photoshop, what is your experience? Any annoyances in the high rez mode?

Thanks

Photoshop is very blury. I am using it, but it is annoying. But it's because the app is not updated. The high rez scaling in general is flawless. I can not tell the windows and taskbar and text is not native.

 

[shaderp]

any more comments from designer/developer perspective? im not really caring about photoshop startup time or game performance.

how is zoom quality on psds in photoshop for you? right now they're messed up due to the current version of photoshop not recognizing the retina screen.

any other programs you use? what about illustrator? for me, all the text and vectors turned out pixelated.

what coding editor/IDE do you use? the only one i know of thats retina-ready is coda 2.

I use Sublime Text 2 which is also updated.

 

[joer80]

Interesting... My computer came unplugged, and it dropped from 60 frames to 31 frames per second. Seems that it auto clocks down on battery power...