New MacBook Pro's Dedicated AMD Graphics Chips Are 'Significantly' Faster and Support Dual 5K Displays

[sundragon]

We did real testing, OpenCL rendering, compression in Adobe CC apps and Blackmagic Resolve.

We found the 460 in the 2016 MacBook Pro to be 33% to 40% faster than the m370x in the 2015 MacBook Pro. Weather or nor you think thats "a considerable margin" is up for debate, people seem to put "thermal envelope" into this discussion, but for what my company does, its non sequitur.

So a performance improvement of 30-40% in a one year span is not enough?
Do you make the same claim for Intel's chips that have less than a 10%, sometimes 5% improvement year to year (at least in the last 5 years)?

I've started to look at reviews for 1060/70/80 equipped laptops and their battery life with the iGPU is okay not as good as the MBP. However, with the dedicated GPU churning, it's considerably shorter than the MBP. How important is that for your work?

 

[jjjoseph]

So a performance improvement of 30-40% in a one year span is not enough?
Do you make the same claim for Intel's chips that have less than a 10%, sometimes 5% improvement year to year (at least in the last 5 years)?

Once 4k became the standard, the 2015 m370x wasn't fast enough either, so it wasn't just the 2016, it was the 2015 as well. The m370x was not powerful enough before the 2016's. 4k got pushed hard from 2013 up until now.. depending on which market your in, some adapted faster, some slower. So this is not a new struggle for pro film and video.. We just thought Apple would come back to the pro market, which they obviously are not.

I've started to look at reviews for 1060/70/80 equipped laptops and their battery life with the iGPU is okay not as good as the MBP. However, with the dedicated GPU churning, it's considerably shorter than the MBP. How important is that for your work?

The GPU is not running full speed the whole time, the GPU is only at full throttle when we have to created dailies or encode for editing.. These laptops are for film and tv media ingesting from 4k ProRes, ProRes is problematic since we are having to re-consider OS X pipelines, and 4k+ MXF, Red Dragon R3D files and sometimes ARRI Raw, but MFX raw is replacing that.
So once the media in ingested on location, we have to sort, organize, then we usually have to encode for edit or for dailies or both. So when we do have a dedicated GPU its not at full throttle all the time, but we need something dedicated, obviously, when we have to bust out all the encoding, which has to be done on location. We have been waiting for the Razer Blade Pro, to test in the field, but haven't gotten our hands on one yet, but we have found the Razer Blade with the 1060 to be pretty decent when it comes to battery life, we are very impressed.. I can't give you exact numbers, but off the top of my head at least at lest 5 or 6 hours, but we always have some sort of battery array onset, so its hard to say.. but the smaller and lighter we can make our setups the better.

 

[bill44]

Ahh. If I could read I would have actually noticed your requirements. (I had to go up the chain.)

I'd be surprised to see any dock carry that on its own. You'd probably have to chain on something like this: https://www.startech.com/AV/Converters/Video/thunderbolt-3-to-dual-displayport~TB32DP2 (and I don't think this works on the new MBPs) which is actually cool in the sense that even the docks can get customized to a certain degree. It means connecting multiple adapters but it beats hoping someone out there puts together the perfect set of ports in a single device.

We'll see if beefier docks show up, but Thunderbolt 2 didn't exactly provide much. The OWC and Elgato were the two best in my experience (OWC has the best/most ports but the Elgato was usable in Windows) and neither allowed for multiple displays unless one of the displays on the chain was Thunderbolt.

Out of curiosity, what's the actual need for USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports? I realize they're faster, but what devices are you using that actually take advantage of that bandwidth and if you were considering new devices why would you take USB over native Thunderbolt?

Do we know the specs on the Type-C ports on the new MBP?
I'm curious weather it supports DisplayPort v.1.3 or v1.4 using Alt Mode. The Polaris chip does, even if Skylake chip does not. If it does, it would be fantastic for future 5K displays.
The problem with thunderbolt:
Price
Cable length (the majority is 0.5m for a 40Gb/s). Where are the optical ones (affordable?)?
Does not support DP 1.3/1.4 (will be sorted in TB4).
The majority of external portable TB3 drives only have 1x TB3 port. Same goes for displays.
In many cases, the extra bandwidth/speed it provides is not necessary for the device in question. E.g. SATA III SSD or HD in a TB enclosure (USB 3.1 Gen 2 is sufficient). I get the convenience of a single cable, if all devices could be chained, but manufacturers cut corners and include only 1.
Official eGPU support for the MBP would be nice, but remember, it's only 4x lane PCIe Gen 3.

What we need is widespread adaption. This will happen once the TB controller moves into the chip/chipset (which is planned). Current price of the Alpine Ridge chips are about $9, which is expensive.
TB4 will double the current speed of 40Gb/s to 80Gb/s, but it will only happen after PCIe 4 is out in 2017. This is necessary to provide support for 8K, HFR, HDR, 10bit/12bit, P3 and beyond.

I get the bandwidth limitation of current docks. Clearly, if you had 4x USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, that's already 40Gb's, never mind extra ports for display etc. Not to mention overhead. However, the same argument can be said for all USB 3.0 hubs. A 4 port USB 3.0 HUB require 20Gb's bandwidth, but the cable from the HUB to the computer only has a 5Gb/s speed. You can populate all 4 ports, but not use them simultaneously (if you do, speed for each will drop).

TB3 has it's place. I like portables that use M.2 NVMe drives. Samsung 960 Pro is good for 3.5GB/s (28Gb/s), but expensive. For large(er) storage, I use AKiTiO Neutrino U3.1 box (USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C) with Samsung Evo 4TB SSD (manufacturers got a tendency to use lesser quality/speed SSD behind a RAID 0 arrangement to compensate for the lack in speed).

Apple should not have released a MB with a Gen 1 port. All 3rd party manufacturers latched on to this, and trying to flog Gen 1 speed devices for the new MBP, upping their prices because it's a new port. It will take a while before we see Gen 2 devices (has anyone seen a 4x Gen 2 HUB?).

As it is, the new MBP is lacking in 3rd party dongles/docks. I can't find a way to connect 3x 4K@60Hz displays to the MBP. TB3 to 2x DP 1.2 devices are incompatible (startech is Windows only and so is Plugable dual displayport adapter).
Docks do not provide 2x DP 1.2 outputs. Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter is HDMI 1.4 only. Best to wait.....until this mess is sorted.
However, if the Type-C ports support DP 1.3/1.4 Alt Mode, we may see DP 1.3 to dual 1.2 adapters (no need for TB3).

I also would like to see a USB-C female to USB 3 male adapter (not cable), so I only have to carry a C to C cable and the adapter. Like this: https://www.amazon.com/Goliton®-Fem...+Data+Adapter+for+Macbook+Tablet+Mobile+Phone
But is it reliable? (waiting for Benson Leung to review it).

 

[BenRacicot]

How fast is the 460??

Yes!!!! Why are the descriptions of the 460 so vague? 130x faster... then we see a spec sheet with the 455... I'm looking for details on the 460! Please post here for anything you got.

 

[tinycg]

Yeah I'm in the same boat just trying to understand if I should pick up a stock model with the 455 or if it's worth waiting and the extra cash for the 460. If the performance is negligible I'm inclined to pass.

 

[aevan]

We just tested a few here in our studio and we saw it flicker, its more of a ROLL, and a catch up, sometimes disconnects intermitenly, like not having enough GPU power to play the video and hold that screen resolution, it seems I have no idea. Their are lots of people talking about it on these forums, just search.. The reports are out there, They are there are there from 2011 all the way until now the 2016 macbook pros. Just look. If you have a 2016 MacBook Pro, why don't you test if yourself.

This is complete nonsense. Netflix maxes out at 4K, and the vast majority of videos is 1080p - the fact that you watched it on a 5K display means absolutely nothing. Are you saying the new MacBook Pros can't stream 1080p video? Or even 4K video? "Because it doesn't have enough GPU power"? Heck the lowest Intel integrated GPUs can play Netflix 4K - and yes, on an external monitor.

You most likely had some other issues, or you're just making this stuff up. You're also claiming that the new Radeons are not faster in OpenCL than 370X even though every single benchmark out there shows that it's much faster. This spreading of FUD is really getting out of hand.
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For me in the big mistake Apple made was the RAM limit of 16GB! This is a joke even when using Photoshop you are going to hit that limit fast.

I don't know about video requirements, but Photoshop - even for really large files - barely uses more than 8Gb RAM. Google it if you don't believe me.

 

[tinycg]

To be fair, I don't open 2GB Photoshop files often, but when I do I can guarantee Photoshop uses every ounce of what I allow from the 32GBs I have. Operationally though, 8-10gb in PS is good. In FCPX or Premiere you want CUDA and 32GB though for anything beyond your 10 minute 4k drone montage

 

[aevan]

To be fair, I don't open 2GB Photoshop files often, but when I do I can guarantee Photoshop uses every ounce of what I allow from the 32GBs I have. Operationally though, 8-10gb in PS is good. In FCPX or Premiere you want CUDA and 32GB though for anything beyond your 10 minute 4k drone montage

Photoshop will fill up any available RAM that you dedicate in settings. If you had 256Gb RAM, it would fill that too. That doesn't mean the efficency will rise dramatically. There were tests that show that after 8Gb RAM increase in performance rises very slowly with additional RAM. Now, I don't know if your case is the exception - but you'd have to test it alongside a 16Gb RAM machine and measure performance to be sure. In other words - the fact Photoshop uses every ounce of RAM you give it, doesn't mean it actually needs that much for optimum performance. I'd wager that even if you removed half of the RAM, even for those 2Gb files, you wouldn't notice any significant difference. Heck, you can try it, reduce memory usage to just 16 and try to work, see if you notice any difference. If you do that, let me know

 

[toke lahti]

Anybody know what happened to http://old-macs.com/ ?

 

[Faltek]

I'm a bit late to the game - but I have a 460 15" MBP that I paid an arm and a leg for - just got it last week and really love the machine - any doubts about the 16 gigs of ram limitation are non-existent now as the computer takes anything I throw at it (visual studio code, 8 tabs of Xcode, 10 tabs of safari, photoshop, illustrator, source tree, chrome, slack, iTunes, etc)....still snappy as hell. DOTA 2 runs well with lots of effects but you need to keep the resolution low - if you crank It up to native it is terrible. Read: you will feed terribly online. Bioshock Infinite plays extremely well on high settings and it's a blast. Basically If the game has the unreal engine and runs on Mac, it should perform great on this machine. Bioshock feels about 55fps (sorry too lazy to look up fps counter but take my word for it) and is really smooth. Don't buy the computer if you want to game on the latest and greatest, but it can game well on older games (which us Mac users are used to). Diablo III with all settings cranked is a blast...but again - it's old so you need to get over that I personally use this machine for a lot of swift/obj-c/unity/etc development and it is a total beast. Don't regret the purchase at all. Build times/compiles, and indexing are so so fast. And the High res retina screen is great when simulating devices (not 10 feet high like on my old pre-retina MBP). Initializing the simulator now takes only about 1 min as opposed to 4/5 on my old computer - very impressed. After init, the simulators launch instantly . The Dongles are stupid and Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave. How could they release a brand new phone that you can't even charge in their new computer unless you buy all these adapters - just silly. The Touch bar is unique and definitely growing on me - in Xcode you can build/step through code, and a whole host of other neat features. Hitting the Siri button above the delete key is annoying and used to happen often but is happening less over time. Also I heard that it takes two taps for volume and brightness adjustments on a review site - that reviewer is stupid. You just tap and hold and then slide where you want it. The speakers are very impressive and setting up the computer on my kitchen counter you can rock out to some bass-y tunes. Love it. So many haters in the office but they crowd around the computer and check it out every day ... and then go back to the Apple Website to check out the computer. It's hilarious. Hope that helps any potential Black Friday fence sitters. Lot of people doubt it but if you want a serious creative tool to get **** done - this computer tears it up. Don't cheap out on the tool you use all day...commit or eat Sh*t

If anyone has any questions about the computer - let me know and I'll try to help