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Despite what the adverts would have us believe, the real fundamental differences between Windows based PCs and Macs, aren't all that stark. One area where they are though, is in graphical power and the latest generation of MacBooks continues that tradition. They pack in AMD's new Radeon Pro 4XX mobile chips and while fine for media, they won't be very good for gaming.
This new line up of Polaris mobile graphics chips is made up of the Radeon Pro 450, 455 and 460, built on the 14nm FinFET process used in the creation of the RX 480 and similar. In terms of raw performance they are more akin to a RX 450, considering the RX 460 desktop card is nearly 30 per cent more powerful than the top end version.
In specifications released by AMD (via Ars), the Radeon 450 Pro is capable of just one teraflop of computing power. To give this some context, the RX 460 desktop GPU produces 2.2 teraflops. A several-generations-old Radeon 5870 produces 2.7 teraflops. While these mobile chips aren't designed to act like desktop graphics cards, you would assume they'd be able to compete with a high-end card that's half a decade old.
AMD/Apple suggest that this new line of MacBooks with Polaris hardware are great for creatives
The big advantage with AMD's new RX series mobile GPUs though is of course power draw. While their desktop counterparts might be quite energy efficient, they can still pull as much as 75 watts of power. In comparison, these new Pro GPUs can operate at under 35w, which should help preserve battery life.
In reality, while these chips will let you do some gaming, you'll need to keep settings low and they won't be very impressive a couple of years down the road.
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KitGuru Says: I almost shudder to think what an Apple gaming laptop would cost. It would probably be like buying a desktop from PC world: mid-range GPU, high-end prices.
“In reality, while these chips will let you do some gaming, you’ll need
to keep settings low and they won’t be very impressive a couple of years
down the road.”
Macbooks were never meant for big power graphics. Even if they could give more power, cooling and battery life is more important as it’s always been for years.
Rubbish article. The Radeon Pros are designed to be as it is, Polaris 11 chips for mobile. At least in the same class, Polaris GPUs work better than Pascal GPUs in GPGPU tasks, the most important for Macs. Anyone who game in a mac is an idiot, as well as Apple’s asking price (as usual). However, there’s nothing wrong with these chips.
no, compared the last gen professional DESKTOP cards from AMD, these are so much better in this range, the W2100, W4100 and W5100/4300 are/were 435.2, 645.1 and 1,428.5 GFLOPS respectively, coming in at 26 and 50 watts (the 4100, 4300 and 5100 all have the same power draw) respectively, given that even the weakest of the WX GPU’s beats out cards that were $120 to $170, I wouldn’t call this weak. The 455 nearly matches a $300 pro card at a fraction of the power draw in a laptop, not just any laptop, a thin factor form laptop and nearly matches the R9 M385X in my laptop which requires a huge heat sink, two fans and a big vent out the back of the machine to keep it cool under load and will rapidly drain the battery (1 minute to the percent of battery) without a charger
MacBook pros are not gaming laptops. 2 TFlops at under 35W TDP is an unprecedented achievement that needs to be acknowledged before assuming everyone out there is a gamer. This kind of tech builds datacenters and supercomputers and content creation. AMD obviously wanted to create a very efficient GPU and they achieved it…Nvidia did not. Now AMD has their engineers focused on High Performance GPUs so we will wait to see how that plays out. Peace and zen to you all
How much did nvidia pay you?
A whole lot !
Since when are macs designed for heavy gaming? And since when is the 460 considered to be a powerful card?
I would like the Author of this Article to explain to the general public, since when are MacBook-s considered a gaming laptop machines?
Yes, they are. They are designed for creative professionals who often need big power graphics. If they can’t provide that to the market in the form factor they actually want to use (which razor seems to have no issues doing, and then some) then they should move it outside the laptop, as a seperate box or put it in the powerbrick. IMO it’s too large of a need and market for them to ignore.
What about creative professionals? If we accept that polaris is the correct choice, why a low end card? The class is the issue here, no?
Since when were the only people that needed graphics cards gamers?
Because this article focuses on gaming solely
You can’t ignore battery life and heat in these Macs. You have to unfortunately make these with small GPUs, the best GPUs for that purpose are obviously Polaris 11 GPUs. Only these can give very little hassle. The only ridiculous thing is how these things are priced.
Irresponsible amount of money.
Ummm, none of the chips mentioned were running at 35W… How much gaming is expected with 35W GPUs…? These are for OpenCL in Photoshop etc…
The fastest one is 1024SPs at a lower frequency and does 1.8tflops…
Heyyo, err fanboy or not… Have you tried gaming on an AMD GPU with OpenGL on Linux or Mac? AMD OpenGL has always been bad… Heck, to the point where in the past the Fury X was getting the same framerate as a GTX 950 in some games on Linux and I’m not even joking… Mac may have Metal API, but tbh I don’t know any big games that use it, instead favoring OpenGL which like I said isn’t pretty… Meh, at least Mac Pro users can bootcamp with Windows to have better performance… Btw I say this all as an owner of an MSI R9 390.
Heyyo, err the “powerful” part? You might wanna read the article again since you seem to have misunderstood what he said. 😛
As for the gaming part? Back when they had nVidia GPUs? They could play OpenGL games decently… Where as now with AMD GPUs they have furthered themselves from gaming due to poor OpenGL performance AMD GPUs have on Macos or Linux…
They need to offer a solution for people who need better performance. Move the graphics card into the powerbrick or monitor if you have to, but there is no point in forcing the consumer to pay more than $500 for a card that will add an extra two or three days or render time per year to compared to competitor.
That’s not what Macs are for.