Retina MacBook Pro Pushes the Limits of its Graphics Capabilities

[URFloorMatt]

So as an actual owner, not some wanna be owner that has OCD over every article out there... I can say yes, first time I opened Safari I noticed a bit of jitter when trying to scroll fast. I downloaded Chrome "Canary" the beta browser from Google for the retina display and haven't noticed much of any lag, jitter or hang ups. I run at 2560x1600 as that is the closest resolution to the 27" Tbolt display I use at work and it keeps my desktop icons in place. It also gives me plenty of workspace without making text to small to read and websites easy to read.

I've used this machine (base model) now for a solid week at work and last weekend and as others have said it's the best Mac I've ever used. The fact when the fans kick in it doesn't sound like a harrier jet is in the room with me is rather nice. The improved sound, incredible display and the usual great keyboard and glass trackpad makes it a great machine. Add in the fact it's the lightest 15" laptop i've ever used or seen, add in the quad core CPU, upgraded GPU and adds a bada$$ display in a 4.5lb package.

Sorry but its an amazing all around experience. Those who have not used it for more than 10 minutes in the Apple store need to realize how nice this machine is. People complain about the price but if they actually look at the differences between the base model 15"MBP and the 15" rMBP of $400 ($1799 vs $2199). Double the ram (4 vs 8), SSD, lose 2lbs, gain the best LCD on a laptop anywhere. Seems like a pretty sweet deal. I need portability and can deal with plugging in one Thunderbolt cable to a raid array to access my media, or do it wirelessly via an AE. Either way it's a blazing fast machine that will only get better with time.

I agree with this. I haven't noticed the FPS issue myself, though I haven't had it long and haven't put it through the paces.

The rMBP is probably a nice computer, maybe even a great one. The problem for some is that it's not a full-featured computer. It's more of a specialty computer like the MBA or mini.

But I also agree with this. On the one hand, if raw performance/power is your goal, the rMBP is probably not what you want. On the other, if you like what the Air brings but want more power, were looking for strong USB3 and/or Thunderbolt support, and/or if you're a fan of Retina panels, then this is the notebook for you. (Also, as others have pointed out, the audio quality is dramatically improved.)

I sold my early 2010 MBP with i7 due to ongoing issues with the GPU failing, and I will say that the performance comparison between the 2010 model and the base Retina are dramatic. This thing runs like butter. It doesn't even flinch when performing every day tasks or pumping 1080p video. I do notice some flittering if you try to scroll quickly in Safari, but nothing that was noticeably distracting or annoying.

My only complaint is the lack of Retina apps. iWork doesn't really support it (you can enable high resolution, but if your Pages document has more than one page, the program won't display subsequent pages. Very strange bug, and a crippling one.)

Also, the fans are refreshingly quiet. I barely even notice them. But the center of the device, and the MacSafe in particular, get very, very hot. First degree burns hot. Not the keys, but the aluminum. Has me a little worried about the longevity of the device.

 

[strausd]

The 650M is the best GPU that Apple can use in the rMBP form factor. (It's also already over clocked to the max - basically GTX660M speeds) You're fooling yourself if you think any laptop manufacturer could cram a GTX680M or AMD 7970M in the rMBP form factor. Even the classic MBP would have an issue cooling off a 100 Watt GPU! (Yes, both Nvidia/AMD's top of the line are 100 watt GPU's.)

Do you have anything to back up your statement about the 650M being overclocked to 660M speeds?

 

[magbarn]

Do you have anything to back up your statement about the 650M being overclocked to 660M speeds?

There's plenty of posts here who have ran their RMBP in bootcamp...
This thread here

Stock clocks are just as high as the GTX660M. And since Nvidia didn't bother to put a 256-bit memory interface on the GTX660M, the GT650M is able to catch up to it.

 

[Office Hours]

The iPad 3's A5X CPU isn't as powerful as a Intel Atom and it's GPU is NOWHERE near as powerful as either the HD4000, let alone the 650m. Yet it runs mobile safari silky smooth. OSX runs perfect at the retina resolution, smooth in the 1680 scaled resolution and starts to dip a little under the HD4000 when in 1920 scaled.

Aside from 1920, the only thing that really lags is safari. Enabling GPU acceleration under chrome gets rid of the lag on 90% of the websites I visit, the ones that do lag, seem to use heavy CSS3 effects. My guess is that these effects have not been optimized for performance on the desktop. Either Mobile Safari makes compromises on quality for performance or Apple took initiative to optimize it because the chip is inherently low performance.

Either way, if the A5X can drive a super silky smooth framerate at 20xx by 15xx, there's absolutely no reason why the HD4000/650m and a quad core i7 can't. IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. I can understand strain in the scaled resolutions but under the native retina? No way. IT HAS TO BE SOFTWARE.

 

[Fortimir]

Single threaded browsers in 2012? Ugh...

This is the real core (punny) of the problem. I bet Firefox will be the first browser to support multi-cores... mostly because they've been talking about it since 2009. It was supposed to be in Firefox 5...

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Do you have anything to back up your statement about the 650M being overclocked to 660M speeds?

Me. I'll back him up. I can't remember if Anand touched on it, but I know several sites did mention that it is overclocked pretty much as much as it can be right out of the box. Some sources jokingly called it a 660M, since it is a souped-up 650.

The GPU is fine. It's not the bottleneck ANYWHERE except for intensive gaming. The CPU and the fact that web browsers still only support a single core is the reason for the lag.

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The rMBP is probably a nice computer, maybe even a great one. The problem for some is that it's not a full-featured computer. It's more of a specialty computer like the MBA or mini.

Not full-featured? I'm sure they were saying the same thing about the iMacs when they did away with the floppy drive.

Few people need an optical drive, and it's no big deal to attach one in the rare times you do want it. Same goes for the ethernet dongle. 16GB will be enough for 95% of users for the life of the computer. The SSD *will* be upgradable. It's on an easily-removable daughterboard and several sources have said OWC and maybe some other vendors will produce replacements.

It's the most powerful laptop they've made. It's the best screen ever put in a computer. It maintains quality battery life expectancies and has fantastic power management. It stays cool and quiet. Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, AND HDMI. I The only thing it is *truly* missing is software support... Which will come. And that's to be expected for a new line of tech that is less than three weeks old. If only silly ol' Apple had giving software companies the heads-up.

So how is it specialty, and more importantly, how is it not full-featured? It has everything most users need, and nothing that people don't.

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Anyways, I wonder why Apple decided to put the same GPU in the rMBP? It's the same as the MBP 15's GPU. It's kind of weird since they fully knew that the rMBP would have to push 4 times the amount of pixels. Not to mention, there IS a 2GB version of the GPU that is in the rMBP, yet Apple decided to put in the same, 1GB variant as in the MBP 15.

It's the CPU, not the GPU (which is extremely adequate). And it's not even the CPU, it's the fact that web browsers aren't programmed to access more than one core. If they were, the lag would disappear. Memory-hogging, bloated, and badly coded websites, combined with web browsers that refuse to innovate... those are the culprits.

 

[blow45]

Yeah it wait a second the browser is apple's own browser, if it lends itself well to parallelism they should have made it able to take advantage of more cores.

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Not full-featured? I'm sure they were saying the same thing about the iMacs when they did away with the floppy drive.

excuse me but that's a bs analogy, it's as bs as an analogy can be actually. The floppy was a very very limited tech not going anywhere that was on the way out very soon. How does that compare with the lack of upgreadabilty for memory on such an expensive pro machine? In a year or two memory will be much cheaper, capable of higher clocks, and with much lower latencies, yet the rmbp wil be stuck with the initial configuration and won't be able to afford any of that. In a year or two the ssd market will have drastically cheaper, far more robust,much larger and faster ssds yet the pro will be stuck with poor third party options for the custom port. The rmbp could have easily been a couple of mils thicker and allowed for a hd drive in place of the optical, that would give users the best of both worlds, ample storage for pro users and a fast boot and main file access via ssd.

What's any of that have to do with the damn floppy?

 

[frabber]

some say a heavily picture laden webpage after being fully loaded exhibits laggy scrolling. so then it must be cpu/gpu. in that case its just moving pixels in the driver that is slow including scaling/downscaling . I wonder how much hardware accelleration they are using in there algorithms right now?

or is it the brute 4 times more pixels factor that slows things down ?

how come a 128bit bandwidth, 384 core GPU isn't sufficient? That should give you 200 FPS in pure moving pixels around.

 

[macccccccc]

I do think there is any point debating. Nth is perfect and the next version will always be better. That said, I am sure people will find issues with the next gen machine. So you either keep waiting until they produce something 100% perfect or have the joy now.

 

[uknowimright]

played with one for about 30 mins since had time to kill before checking out Bob Saget's stand up

display looks great, nice design but when I compared transitions to a reg MacBook Pro you could definitely notice some choppy animations

 

[HurryKayne]

I'm really curious to see when external GPUS via thunderbolt will become available.

Me too,but with Intel and Apple..well,i mean if you can add a new external gpu you could bypass updates ,which very often are (for us i mean Sandy Bridge is still good compared to Ivy,isn't it?)just on the Gpu side,as in the Imac and in the laptops..,don't know what Cook will do then,to go with this tiny steps ,even delayed (Imac-mac mine aren't yet upgraded) ,for the years to come,or to approach the 2013 givin the choice to the consumer..making the mac mini-pro a unique line..maybe modular,with external Gpu boxes..,but..if this happen,maybe all the desktop line would be wiped out,a laptop while you are around and a Tb Gpu external box linked to a cinema display sitted on your desk. .
On the other side Thunderbolt technology has a lot to give again and maybe i'm wronging,i really hope i am,
and in 2013 i suppose Apple will have to show more it holds in its secret Ive's bunker!

 

[SirHaakon]

So Apple released tech that wasn't ready yet. Awesome.

Actually, they're forcing tech to catch up more quickly instead of just settling for the status quo and covering the world with mediocrity. This is great news.

 

[randomnut]

People seem to be forgetting that it could be as simple as unoptimized drivers. It is common for driver updates to provide performance increases of 50, 100% or even more for particular workloads.

Hopefully better drivers get released soon.

 

[iBug2]

Seriously, this thread is a joke. People don't read anything and just keep posting nonsense.


Facebook scrolling gives bad FPS on my Mac Pro as well (31 fps) and that's with HD5870, a very powerful GPU.

The issue is again 100% CPU usage on a single core.

 

[Sackvillenb]

Now that's extremely interesting... I guess Apple was a bit ahead of the curve on this one. Which is fine. The hardware will catch up soon enough!

 

[pmau]

People seem to be forgetting that it could be as simple as unoptimized drivers. It is common for driver updates to provide performance increases of 50, 100% or even more for particular workloads.

Hopefully better drivers get released soon.

2880x1800x4 (8bit RGBA) are approx. 20 MByte.
Try to draw that at 60fps and you are at 1200MByte/s = 1,2 GByte/sec

Now think about available memory bandwidth.
Both VRAM and RAM, because you have to transfer new data if you scroll.

This machine is maxed out because of memory bandwidth.
No driver update, CUDA, OpenCL or anything else will help with that.

 

[phantasmagoria]

Thanks for the info

Out of curiosity, do you know of any tools that will just scale the screen from 1920X1200 up to 2880X1800 to increase GPU performance?

SwitchResX is a great utility which will let you pick or define just about any resolution, but the non-HiDPI 1920x1200 resolution isn't a patch on the HiDPI (scaled) alternative.

I came to the rMBP from a 17" MBP so I'm using the scaled 1920x1200 res as its the same as I'm used to and also matches the native res of the 23" Cinema display that I often use my rMBP alongside. I don't have an inclination to run benchmarking tools, but I've not noticed any real-world performance issues.

 

[iBug2]

I'm gonna keep posting this over and over until people take 5 seconds to read it.


8 Core Mac Pro with ATI 5870 on 30" ACD with 2560*1600

Scrolling Facebook 31 fps and 100% cpu on Safari web process

Scrolling Macrumors, 48 fps and 8% cpu Safari web process

This is NOT a rMBP issue at all.

The testing is done the exact same way as Anandtech, using Quartz Debug tool to measure framerates. The 5870 is a 3.5 times more powerful GPU than GT650M and more powerful than any mobile GPU Apple could have put in. So the problem is not the GPU, at all.

 

[Diveflo]

2880x1800x4 (8bit RGBA) are approx. 20 MByte.
Try to draw that at 60fps and you are at 1200MByte/s = 1,2 GByte/sec

Now think about available memory bandwidth.
Both VRAM and RAM, because you have to transfer new data if you scroll.

This machine is maxed out because of memory bandwidth.
No driver update, CUDA, OpenCL or anything else will help with that.

dude...that's like saying no one in the world could possibly watch FullHD movies at home, because the raw material is like a gazillion gigabytes.
There are optimization techniques at work, the workload rendering a website are lightyears away from your "calculation"

 

[the8thark]

You just summarized all Apple offerings ever.

I like the GPU in my iMac. I don't see the issue with it. it does everything I need it to. Plays the games I play at reasonable fps (25+) and most importantly it is small and low power. It's not an ugly eyesore, large and with it's own dedicated fan.

I care about my power bills and want them as low as possible. And for that the trade off in the GPU I have is in my eyes fantastic. And no point having a great GPU when the screen is sub-par. Luckily Apple screens are the best.

So overall, I don't think Apple has bad GPUs in it's products. I think the choices are very good in terms of GPU size/power usage and real world output they give.

 

[Macist]

This is like the original Quartz all over again. Apple decide to go with a processor-heavy PDF-based display system merely to put a few windows on the desktop and later had to use the 3D capabilities of graphics cards to stop machines being dog slow.

 

[pmau]

dude...that's like saying no one in the world could possibly watch FullHD movies at home, because the raw material is like a gazillion gigabytes.
There are optimization techniques at work, the workload rendering a website are lightyears away from your "calculation"

And I know that it was an oversimplification.

Apple has designed a product with hardware specs that run at its limits when doing simple operations.

I know that movies are rendered in YUV textures that are scaled and converted to RGB by the GPU.

My point is that a large percentage of available resources is needed just to drive the display and normal desktop operations.

And this is the main thing I don't like about the technical "design" of a Pro product.

 

[phantasmagoria]

And I know that it was an oversimplification.

Apple has designed a product with hardware specs that run at its limits when doing simple operations.

I know that movies are rendered in YUV textures that are scaled and converted to RGB by the GPU.

My point is that a large percentage of available resources is needed just to drive the display and normal desktop operations.

And this is the main thing I don't like about the technical "design" of a Pro product.

How are you finding your rMBP in real-world usage? Are you being held back by those theoretical limitations? I'm a "pro" using mine daily for work, and it's doing a fine job for me.

 

[Osirison]

Whats the big deal about Facebook and CPU usage?

When i'm scrolling down slow or fast the max overall CPU usage only get up to 15% and GPU browser framerate between 20-60fps.

My system is a Windows 7 PC i7 920 (first/now old i7) 12GB ram GTX295 using Chrome.
Why are Mac users reporting 100% CPU load?
Also noticed FB being much slower on iPad.

I will get my MBPr next week, so can't try it yet.

 

[CJM]

And this is why I don't own a mac any more. The daft hardware choices in the name of design don't suit 'pro' machines.

 

[mrbyu]

I'm gonna keep posting this over and over until people take 5 seconds to read it.


8 Core Mac Pro with ATI 5870 on 30" ACD with 2560*1600

Scrolling Facebook 31 fps and 100% cpu on Safari web process

Scrolling Macrumors, 48 fps and 8% cpu Safari web process

This is NOT a rMBP issue at all.

The testing is done the exact same way as Anandtech, using Quartz Debug tool to measure framerates. The 5870 is a 3.5 times more powerful GPU than GT650M and more powerful than any mobile GPU Apple could have put in. So the problem is not the GPU, at all.

You've missed the point... If you attach a 2560*1600 display to your Mac that's your decision.

But if you buy a rMBP and you experience low framerate after taking the computer out of the box, that's another story, you didn't even have the chance to use your hardware (as it meant to be used) flawlessly.

Btw, correct me if I'm wrong, but you've just proved in your comment that with your hiper-super GPU (with a lower resolution screen than the rMBP) you also don't have surpassing framerate. And after that you made the conclusion that these experiences with the rMBP (which has much weaker GPU than yours and also a higher resolution screen) have nothing to do with the GPU?