None of the 10 Series cards have a 35W TDP, using a GPU with a decent TDP would of course sacrifice thinness which is all Apple seem to care about lately.
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New MacBook Pro and Gaming?
- Thread starter thomas1984
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I don't know much about GPUs, but for those who say the GPU in the MBP is **** for gaming, I have a PC with a Nvidia GTX 660 Ti and I play The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 at HIGH and 60 fps (that's my monitor top fps), also Overwatch. Don't know how this GPU is compared to the Radeon Pro 560, but mine is kinda old and I can play everything more than decently.
Okay, one cannot compare games which are not available for Macs. It also depends on the game. Some games run better off CPU (WoW Legion) while others run better off GPU. You also need to remember, Apple sucks bigly when it comes to drivers for their GPU. Add into the fact AMD also sucks with their own drivers vs. Nvidia, which they provide Macs drivers now and regularly updated. So yes, MBPs (including mine) really is quite subpar vs. a comparable PC w/ Nvidia.
And far as power usage, that's a silly thing to bring up. Especially when there are laptops out there equally thin but better internal components. Apple simply is, once again 3-5 years behind PCs. Aaannd, lest we forget about Metal being buggy and not adopted by the industry as a whole so there's that setback...
To the OP, yes if you want a decent laptop for gaming, then go PC all the way, get a modern GPU that isn't under clocked to the max and save probably $1k+.
I have the 15 inch coming with the base 450, I'm perfectly fine running X-PLane on it when I get it, sure, its not a gaming rig but it works for me 
Has anyone looked at the BizonBOX 3 eGPU? Apart from the ludicrously high price, it looks pretty great. (And let's face it, if we were worried about ludicrously high prices, we'd be posting on the Dell forums, not here.)
Has anyone played with one of these? Any thoughts on how well it will work?
Has anyone played with one of these? Any thoughts on how well it will work?
I don't think the driver thing is nearly as true now as it used to be.
Uh...
"3-5 years"? No. Skylake's pretty recent. rx460 is also pretty recent. "3-5 years ago" did not get you 14nm process for your GPU.
Now, if you want to claim that Apple's on the low end of the power curve, well, sure. I'm not 100% sure that my three-year-old gaming laptop will still be faster than the new MBP, but I won't be at all surprised if it is. (It cost me something like $950, too.) And it does use more power -- 135W or so, instead of 85. And if I got a new machine, it'd absolutely run rings around anything Apple is likely to ship.
But that's not "years behind". That's "not willing to make a machine big enough to dissipate that much heat."
This is pretty much the case. After a particularly unsuccessful attempt at getting a "gaming-capable" mac laptop, I stopped trying. Now instead of trying to get those last little bits of very expensive performance from Apple, I get cheaper stuff from Apple and have enough money left over to get a PC gaming laptop every couple-few years.
And it's not remotely a replacement for the Mac. I think the maximum thickness of the (somewhat wedge-shaped) gaming laptop I'm currently using is probably 1.5" or so. It's got air vents that are taller than the new MBPs. But! It can run games with pretty tolerable performance, it has two drive bays so I can put in a second SSD, memory is upgradeable, and it runs quieter under higher load than any of the MBP-family machines I've had in the last decade.
... Which is to say, if Apple charged $1k for a MacOS license, I'd probably get a high-end gaming laptop and a $1k MacOS license, and be happier with the results.
HD Monitor I assume? Also, 2.5 TFLOPS on the 660 Ti vs 1.8 TFLOPS on the Radeon 460 just going by compute.
Exactly. Which is why these laptops should not be called "Pro", as we need Pro-level graphic chips, not designed laptops. Sure its nice to have a laptop be thin, but what good does that make when we are left with a gimped machine.
Just throwing it out there, LoL runs great on the new base Macbook Pro.
This isn't a gaming laptop; it isn't going to include a gaming GPU. Instead, they focus on using the AMD Radeon Pro line (they used to call it the FireGL line). It's optimized for applications like 3D rendering, Final Cut Pro, Maya, Photoshop, etc. Utilities that traditional gaming GPU's are a bit less efficient in. It's a trade-off. Apple has used the desktop version of similar GPU's for years in the Mac Pro line. Which falls behind a bit in gaming; but is far faster than fast gaming cards at those content creation tasks.
It's also an energy efficient GPU. Which allows real work to get done while on the battery. Not only does it have the integrated GPU for light duty tasks; but the dedicated GPU is efficient enough to enable a few hours of real work without draining the battery flat. The GTX 10 series and similar GPU's use a lot more power.
If you're shopping for a gaming laptop and "MacBook Pro" is on your list, you're doing it wrong. Conversations about gaming on a Mac are usually relegated to a secondary function. i.e., someone who wants a laptop for content creation, or even just for basic productivity and they really like macOS and/or the industrial design of a Mac, but who also doesn't mind spending a bit more on the right upgrades so they can play the occasional game at 1080p on medium settings.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Graphics-540.149939.0.html
Here is performance of HD540 if anyone is interested.
Here is performance of HD540 if anyone is interested.
Please do yourself a huge favor and go to a PC laptop. Macs have never been known for gaming, and now you can buy a top of the line gaming laptop with a gtx 1070 and above for less than the top of the line macbook pro. Just to give you an idea of the performance difference, a gtx 1070 is roughly 4x more powerful than the best GPU you can get in the new MBP.
Gaming Laptop... pick one. You can't have both. If you want to play Fallout 4, then you need a gaming computer. Those are usually desktops with desktop class GPUs.
Today's laptops are good for games made 8 years ago... no wait, Crysis was made 8 years ago and Macs still can't run that with decent specs... nevermind!
I keep seeing these things and mentions of home made eGPUs but haven't heard much feedback about 'em.
Agree with this, but if OP really wants a laptop rather than a desktop, I think Razer has a desktop class GPU in one of their laptops, no? And they have a "plug and play" eGPU system (Razer Core). Might wanna check them out.
It isn't only Razer, many companies are now putting the nVidia desktop grade 10 series into laptops and they are all destroying the MBP's new GPU's. The strongest GPU you can get in the new MBP is roughly equivalent to the WEAKEST nVidia 10 series (1050). There's already more than a few thin PC's out there that have a 1060 in them which is about 2.5x stronger than the strongest MBP GPU.
... its faster than the Quadros in the 3.5kg+ laptops people around here like to quote as a real 'Pro machine'.
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I think you meant "Sigh". Still not the point, as you are not selling Quadros anymore. You are selling latest high-end "Pro-level" generation hardware, which is totally not.
By sacrificing battery life, yes. The 1060 draws more power than the entire MBP. Using a 50+ TDP GPU was never in Apple's design spec, because they were always concerned about delivering a well-rounded laptop that has usable battery life. I you look at the 1060-equipped laptops, you'd notice that they are a) reducing their battery volume (because they need more space to fit that GPU and its cooling b) using desperate cooling solutions (like basically opening the entire bottom of the laptop for air intake — hey dust!) and c) still run incredibly hot under load. Thats literally duck-tape engineering, with the only purpose of fitting that hot GPU inside the chassis. Or you have well-built gaming laptops that utilise well-engineered cooling solutions with heat-pipes etc (like the great Clevo laptops), but then they are substantially heavier and their battery life is non-existent. Apple is essentially taking a no-nonsense approach here IMO, by offering well balanced performance (and currently best in-class GPU) without sacrificing the essence of the laptop: mobility. A machine that has high performance but will give up after 2-3 hours mixed usage is useless to me.
BTW, this discussion is now happening like in at least 4 different threads at the same time. Is this redundancy really nessesary?
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Sorry, dumb Apple's autocorrect
So a Quadro is not a pro level hardware now? I am truly confused.
Nevertheless, lets just agree that Apple never made a Pro laptop and never will and just move on? I find it very surprising that people expect Apple to dramatically divert from their own design spec they have followed for over a decade now. And BTW, its the first time that Apple used a GPU that is marketed as professional (e.g. Quadro or FireGL level) in a laptop.
Not quite, but the thing is, Apple sells this as a latest generation "Pro" machine. With the current specs it is not. Apple does not sell the Quadro. At any rate lets assume they sold it, while that hardware was considered "Pro" in the past, today's standards dictate it is ancient and not worthy of the "Pro" moniker. Just like a GTX 295 or GTX 285. You wouldn't call a machine using those a "Pro" machine.
And yes, lets agree to that.