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Why Macbook Pro 15 has weaker(integrated) graphics card than 13 inch?

L

Luigi3

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 11, 2012
107
13
Hey there,

I noticed that the performance of Macbook pro 15 2017 on battery is somewhat mediocre(laggy scroll on Safari and Finder, laggy swipe on workspaces). I noticed that Macbook pro 13 inch has better! integrated graphics, it's about 15% percent better in 3DMark:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Iris-...-HD-Graphics-620_7656_7652_7435.247598.0.html

I'll address the arguments that would show here:

'but pro 15 has discrete graphics'
True, but it's turned off until you ran app that requires high performance graphics(Photos.app for instance) and drains battery easily. So you're using integrated graphics most of the time.

'Well they saved money because two graphics'
But they could apply the same! And 15 inch has bigger screen estate to render and they gave even worse graphics! You can go to full screen safari default page and scroll up(favorites icons will go underneath the address) and this has, like, 30 fps? I had 13 2017 and it had no lags/fps drops in normal usage.

What the hell?
 
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Intel does not offer H-series CPUs with Iris graphics. Nothing Apple could do here.

Also, the Iris Plus in the 13" is theoretically twice as fast as the HD 630 in the 15", not just 15% faster (880 GFLOPs vs 442 GFLOPs). The 64 MB embedded memory should help even further. This 3DMark score seems to be worst case for the Iris in this comparison.
 
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Poki said:
Intel does not offer H-series CPUs with Iris graphics. Nothing Apple could do here.

Also, the Iris Plus in the 13" is theoretically twice as fast as the HD 630 in the 15", not just 15% faster (880 GFLOPs vs 442 GFLOPs). The 64 MB embedded memory should help even further. This 3DMark score seems to be worst case for the Iris in this comparison.
Click to expand...

True - this makes the situation even worse. To have integrated 13" performance I need to switch to discrete on 15".
But as a consumer I don't get the argument that Intel does not provide such config - I bought the most expensive Macbook pro and have worse performance than weakest 13".
 
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robvas said:
Is the 2D performance worse?

As far as 3D being worse, it's dumb to complain about that when you bought the model with a dedicated GPU but refuse to use it
Click to expand...

Yes. Fullscreen Finder scroll is choppy, same as Safari. Overall look and feel is bad, sometimes microlags that are not acceptable on laptop for $3500. Needless to say sticky buttons on keyboard.

And I answered you in first post - Macbook will use integrated graphics most of the time. I can have Radeon when plugged in to charger, but on battery I use integrated graphis - the performance is far worse.
 
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Luigi3 said:
True - this makes the situation even worse. To have integrated 13" performance I need to switch to discrete on 15".
But as a consumer I don't get the argument that Intel does not provide such config - I bought the most expensive Macbook pro and have worse performance than weakest 13".
Click to expand...

With Intel CPUs, there's simply no way to do it better, except using a dedicated GPU all the time and burning through your battery, or by using a 28W Iris part which has less cores (two instead of four at 7th gen, four instead of six at 8th gen).

They could use Ryzen, but again, there's simply no Ryzen Mobile CPU as powerful as Intel's H-series CPUs.

So yes, there's nothing Apple could do against that with hardware. They may be able to make the UI smoother by optimizing the software though. No one can convince me that a 442 GFLOP GPU is not capable of smoothly running a UI, and 2880 x 1800 is not even a super high resolution. Maybe Mojave will improve things.
 
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Luigi3 said:
Yes. Fullscreen Finder scroll is choppy, same as Safari. Overall look and feel is bad, sometimes microlags that are not acceptable on laptop for $3500.
Click to expand...

I haven't noticed any of that. Is it possible that you laptop has some underlaying problem? There was some occasional UI lag in older versions of macOS, but that was due to less optimal algorithms used. That all should have been fixed by 10.13.
[doublepost=1528289211][/doublepost]
Poki said:
With Intel CPUs, there's simply no way to do it better, except using a dedicated GPU all the time and burning through your battery, or by using a 28W Iris part which has less cores (two instead of four at 7th gen, four instead of six at 8th gen).
Click to expand...

And another thing is that throwing a faster GPU on it won't really solve anything, since it would kill your battery. The true answer is by optimising the software. And again, High Sierra should have fixed any issues in that area. With El Capitan etc. I was occasionally seeing some lag with Dock Stacks and Mission Control, but now everything is super smooth. Which is quite a feat, since Mission Control draws all the windows in realtime...
 
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leman said:
I haven't noticed any of that. Is it possible that you laptop has some underlaying problem? There was some occasional UI lag in older versions of macOS, but that was due to less optimal algorithms used. That all should have been fixed by 10.13.
[doublepost=1528289211][/doublepost]

And another thing is that throwing a faster GPU on it won't really solve anything, since it would kill your battery. The true answer is by optimising the software. And again, High Sierra should have fixed any issues in that area. With El Capitan etc. I was occasionally being some lag with Dock Stacks and Mission Control, but now everything is super smooth. Which is quite a feat, since Mission Control draws all the windows in realtime...
Click to expand...

Demo for you: https://gfycat.com/SlushyTheseBlackrussianterrier

First is the Intel, second(unckecking box) is the Radeon. You need to have full screen(not by tapping green button, but window is strechted to the maximum) and long list of files. Same with safari scroll.
 
Luigi3 said:
Demo for you: https://gfycat.com/SlushyTheseBlackrussianterrier

First is the Intel, second(unckecking box) is the Radeon. You need to have full screen(not by tapping green button, but window is strechted to the maximum) and long list of files. Same with safari scroll.
Click to expand...

Dunno, all I see in that video is the user scrolling with different speeds :D Like you know, the speed of animation follows the speed of your fingers. Maybe my temporal visual perception is not so good however.

Anyway, I just tried it on a folder with 800+ items and maximised (not fullscreen) Finder window. If I scroll through the entire folder, there is a brief moment of lag at around the middle — no matter if I use the iGPU or the dGPU. I assume this lag occurs since the system actually has to load the list of the files. As to Safari — there are some pages where I see lag when scrolling, but those are almost exclusively very complex pages that load the content dynamically.

BTW, an application where you see a lot of lag is App Store. That is just how its coded... I can't perceive any difference between the GPUs though.
 
leman said:
Dunno, all I see in that video is the user scrolling with different speeds :D Like you know, the speed of animation follows the speed of your fingers. Maybe my temporal visual perception is not so good however.
Click to expand...

It is indeed - I can measure the fps counter and integrated is on average 10 fps worse. It's 45-50 integrated vs 60 discrete.
 
Poki said:
Intel does not offer H-series CPUs with Iris graphics. Nothing Apple could do here.
Click to expand...

Money talks. Apple could’ve easily got what they needed from Intel but chose not to. It’s one of the many things that went backwards with the 2016/17 versions. One of the reasons the 2015 was so great was its excellent smooth UI performance, even on low-power integrated graphics.
robvas said:
Is the 2D performance worse?
Click to expand...

Yes, 2D performance is noticeably and significantly worse with such poor integrated graphics on a high resolution screen. The Iris Plus graphics are much better (as highlighted above)
 
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Luigi3 said:
Yes. Fullscreen Finder scroll is choppy, same as Safari. Overall look and feel is bad, sometimes microlags that are not acceptable on laptop for $3500. Needless to say sticky buttons on keyboard.

And I answered you in first post - Macbook will use integrated graphics most of the time. I can have Radeon when plugged in to charger, but on battery I use integrated graphis - the performance is far worse.
Click to expand...

So go buy a 13 inch or a windows laptop. Problem solved. You know you hate it yet you aren’t doing anything to change it*?




* complaining isn’t doing anything then using up your time writing this
 
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Luigi3 said:
Hey there,

I noticed that the performance of Macbook pro 15 2017 on battery is somewhat mediocre(laggy scroll on Safari and Finder, laggy swipe on workspaces). I noticed that Macbook pro 13 inch has better! integrated graphics, it's about 15% percent better in 3DMark:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Iris-...-HD-Graphics-620_7656_7652_7435.247598.0.html

I'll address the arguments that would show here:

'but pro 15 has discrete graphics'
True, but it's turned off until you ran app that requires high performance graphics(Photos.app for instance) and drains battery easily. So you're using integrated graphics most of the time.

'Well they saved money because two graphics'
But they could apply the same! And 15 inch has bigger screen estate to render and they gave even worse graphics! You can go to full screen safari default page and scroll up(favorites icons will go underneath the address) and this has, like, 30 fps? I had 13 2017 and it had no lags/fps drops in normal usage.

What the hell?
Click to expand...

You can force the 15" model to always use the Radeon GPU if you want.
 
Luigi3 said:
Yes. Fullscreen Finder scroll is choppy, same as Safari. Overall look and feel is bad, sometimes microlags that are not acceptable on laptop for $3500. Needless to say sticky buttons on keyboard.

And I answered you in first post - Macbook will use integrated graphics most of the time. I can have Radeon when plugged in to charger, but on battery I use integrated graphis - the performance is far worse.
Click to expand...

As for Finder being choppy it sounds like the OS install may have issues. I am writing this on a 2013 21.5" iMac with Intel Iris GPU and Finder scrolls flawlessly. I don't have any benchmarks to prove this but I can say with pretty good certainty that the current Radeon the 2017 MacBook Pro is more powerful that an integrated GPU on a 5 year old iMac
 
High Sierra significantly improved UI performance over Sierra on the 2016/2017 15" MBPs, but it still has some issues in several places. Notably, opening my Downloads stack on my dock in the "Grid" view animates at a pretty rough 30ish FPS (which, to be fair, is significantly up from the probably 5fps it was in Sierra). I hope Mojave improves things further.
 
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leman said:
How did you measure the FPS?
Click to expand...

some magic tool called quartz debug: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2wf1mg/you_see_lags_on_yosemite_try_quartz_debugapp/
[doublepost=1528364730][/doublepost]
davidmartindale said:
As for Finder being choppy it sounds like the OS install may have issues. I am writing this on a 2013 21.5" iMac with Intel Iris GPU and Finder scrolls flawlessly. I don't have any benchmarks to prove this but I can say with pretty good certainty that the current Radeon the 2017 MacBook Pro is more powerful that an integrated GPU on a 5 year old iMac
Click to expand...

No, it doesnt' have issues. You mentioned iMac with Iris - Iris is much better than integrated Intel HD in Macbook pro 2017. Moreover, your iMac has lower resolution than my Macbook.
Apple has issues to provide good enough GPU to handle basic tasks in OSX such as Safari scroll.
 
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Luigi3 said:
some magic tool called quartz debug: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2wf1mg/you_see_lags_on_yosemite_try_quartz_debugapp/
[doublepost=1528364730][/doublepost]

No, it doesnt' have issues. You mentioned iMac with Iris - Iris is much better than integrated Intel HD in Macbook pro 2017. Apple has issues to provide good enough GPU to handle basic tasks in OSX such as Safari scroll.
Click to expand...

Provide some specifications to back up that a 5 year old iris gpu is better than a 2017 intel integrated gpu.

Have you tried a clean install of Mac OS? Because what your describing sounds like an issue and is certainly not expected behavior.
 
davidmartindale said:
Provide some specifications to back up that a 5 year old iris gpu is better than a 2017 intel integrated gpu.

Have you tried a clean install of Mac OS? Because what your describing sounds like an issue and is certainly not expected behavior.
Click to expand...

I tried to reinstall, no luck. There is no problem with my mac - it's a problem with all 15" line.
Here's the rough comparison - you can clearly see that your GPU is better and has to render lower resolution - thus no lags.
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compar...Intel-HD-630-Desktop-Kaby-Lake/m8190vsm178724
 
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Luigi3 said:
I tried to reinstall, no luck. There is no problem with my mac - it's a problem with all 15" line.
Here's the rough comparison - you can clearly see that your GPU is better and has to render lower resolution - thus no lags.
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compar...Intel-HD-630-Desktop-Kaby-Lake/m8190vsm178724
Click to expand...

Fair.

I just don't see the issues that you are having as being expected. But I have had very little hands on use with the new MacBook Pros. I do however work with a lot of people that do use them and have not heard of this sort of issue.
 
Miltz said:
Well you can't have it all. Some windows laptops last 1.5 hours with Super Fast Graphics... Pick your poison.
I'm sure the MAC will last longer than that.
Click to expand...
The whole point of the OP is that the iGPU of the 13" is better than the 15". We are all well aware that the dGPU is better, thank you.
 
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