rMBP Question - FCP, Photoshop + Gaming

[SiskoKid]

Hey!

So I currently have a MacBook Air which has treated me very well, but I recently got a new job and will start in a little over a week.

Having a portable computer that can handle light to medium amounts of video editing and medium amount of photo editing would be super helpful.

I was looking at the rMBP, but I'm unsure if buying the lowest end version would be sufficient for my needs. I've heard that FCP can need a lot of RAM and with a retina display I don't know if adding more RAM is necessary. And it makes me a tad nervous that the hard drive only has 256GB of space.

I also am wondering if plugging the rMBP into an external monitor with a lower resolution will bump up the frames per second for gaming or if it would be no different than just gaming on the laptop's screen.

Thanks for any help!

 

[SiskoKid]

Just bumping this. Sorry to be a bother.

 

[valleydesign]

I've got a 2.7/16gb/512gb on the way. I don't do much video at all but a do a ton of heavy lifting in photoshop/illustrator/indesign. Not concerned one bit. I'm replacing my early '08 mbp and when it was at its prime it could handle moderately large Ps files easily. As for the screen, I myself will be hooking into a 27" ACD. I'd be interested in an answer to that question as well. Logically, its driving less pixels... but Idk.

 

[NMF]

If the game in question is being rendered at a lower resolution, the performance will be better 100% of the time. So yes, using the ACD will improve performance... but not a ton (assuming you want to run at native resolution). I imagine that dropping the game down to 1080p would be the best performance/quality trade-off in most cases.

Oh, and make sure the MBP itself is closed and/or has the display disabled.