Apple dumps NVidia from the Macbook Pro

[gamervivek]

Doesn't look "much, much better" than M370X here in gaming tests, doubt it's any better with opencl.

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-R9-M370X-Mac-vs-GeForce-GTX-950M

 

[Gikaseixas]

what about compared to other suitable nvidia skus?

Believe me i know other skus would be a better alternative but what GPU last year's model had?

 

[Gikaseixas]

GM107 would have been much, much better than Cape Verde. It's sad that Apple no longer chooses the best components, but chooses the cheapest ones.

Apple doesn't make pure gamind laptops, they have software that takes advantages of other apps, ofcourse price was also a factor but this is normal when you're Apple and want to maximize margins while improving the overall package vs last year model.

Many here criticize Apple's decision to go AMD but i bet the decision making team tested and decided AMD was better for their specific applications so let's not pretend we are smarter and know it all.

 

[monstercameron]

Apple doesn't make pure gamind laptops, they have software that takes advantages of other apps, ofcourse price was also a factor but this is normal when you're Apple and want to maximize margins while improving the overall package vs last year model.

Many here criticize Apple's decision to go AMD but i bet the decision making team tested and decided AMD was better for their specific applications so let's not pretend we are smarter and know it all.

But they want windows gaming...on a Mac.
When you think about it Apple is all about a unified ecosystem and that is why iOS and Mac OS X apps are well designed. With them going amd on all their big boi skus, it would make sense to go amd on their big boi laptop.

 

[Cloudfire777]

Doesn't look "much, much better" than M370X here in gaming tests, doubt it's any better with opencl.

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-R9-M370X-Mac-vs-GeForce-GTX-950M

Worst site ever.

Here, real results. Go compare them
And just to kill of any "thats not a M370X". Yes it is, the M275 is actually running 925MHz clock while M370X is @800MHz. So the results below is a bit faster than M370X.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-950M.138026.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R9-M275.124666.0.html

Thief
M370X: 10.5FPS
GTX 950M: 19.3FPS

Metro Last Light
M370X: 13.4FPS
GTX 950M: 22.4FPS

Bioshock Infinte
M370X: 14.4FPS
GTX 950M: 29.6FPS

etc etc etc

Then its the OpenCL comparison which was posted by NTMBK where they compared against GT650M Kepler GPU.
Its pretty well known that Maxwell offer a huge boost in OpenCL. I`m too bored to go look it up for the GPUs above but rest assured it beats the crap out of M370X too.

NTMBK was right about one thing, that Apple knows what they are doing. But not in the context he tried to show, ie performance. The decision was mostly all about buying the cheapest chips they could get, and charging a big premium for crap hardware under a different name. Its all about making them fatter and richer while screwing over their customers who buy anything Apple sell them.

 

[coercitiv]

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads...the-nvidia-750m.1883810/page-12#post-21358516

Looking at some gaming benches posted there, now I'm wondering if isn't 1.2 with memory bandwidth improvements.

Interesting, thank you.

The CompuBench link a few posts bellow is also somewhat useful when comparing AMD M370X and Nvidia 860M. Add those gaming benchmarks and the situation no longer looks like the unmitigated disaster this thread was painting.

 

[Stickskillz]

Worst site ever.

Here, real results. Go compare them
And just to kill of any "thats not a M370X". Yes it is, the M275 is actually running 925MHz clock while M370X is @800MHz. So the results below is a bit faster than M370X.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-950M.138026.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R9-M275.124666.0.html

Thief
M370X: 10.5FPS
GTX 950M: 19.3FPS

Metro Last Light
M370X: 13.4FPS
GTX 950M: 22.4FPS

Bioshock Infinte
M370X: 14.4FPS
GTX 950M: 29.6FPS

etc etc etc

Then its the OpenCL comparison which was posted by NTMBK where they compared against GT650M Kepler GPU.
Its pretty well known that Maxwell offer a huge boost in OpenCL. I`m too bored to go look it up for the GPUs above but rest assured it beats the crap out of M370X too.

NTMBK was right about one thing, that Apple knows what they are doing. But not in the context he tried to show, ie performance. The decision was mostly all about buying the cheapest chips they could get, and charging a big premium for crap hardware under a different name. Its all about making them fatter and richer while screwing over their customers who buy anything Apple sell them.

Simple question, how much does NVIDIA pay you?

 

[gamervivek]

Interesting, thank you.

The CompuBench link a few posts bellow is also somewhat useful when comparing AMD M370X and Nvidia 860M. Add those gaming benchmarks and the situation no longer looks like the unmitigated disaster this thread was painting.

Yeah the person I posted CoH benches from was ready to return the laptop because of the Cape Verde news, wonder how many sales were lost due to that.

Anyway, if the site Cloudy has posted is any indication of the best performance possible from these chips and his rant about the specs of these chips is right, then I think M370X is GCN1.2 or even higher considering how well it does against the M275.

Grid Autosport: 26.8 vs. 18.7 - 43%
Bioshock Infinite: 25.7 vs. 14.4 -78%
Thief: 17.2 vs. 10.5 - 64%

and well, but not so well,

Metro Last Light : 16.1 vs. 13.4 - 20%
Tomb Raider: 28.5 vs. 25.2 - 13%

As they say,

Apple states that the card is "up to 80% faster" than the previously used NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M. We doubt that the card is 80% faster in average 3D gaming, but to put the 80% in perspective, in 3DMark 11 an 80% plus would lead to the performance level of a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M or Radeon R9 M280X.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R9-M370X.142763.0.html

Surely not as fast as 950M, but who knows how much is it throttling with apple and perhaps it can be closer still. And of course we know how well AMD are with their drivers.

 

[Rakehellion]

And just to kill of any "thats not a M370X". Yes it is, the M275 is actually running 925MHz clock while M370X is @800MHz

Not the same chip at all.

 

[bradly1101]

The Pagasys video processing programs use CUDA (PC only). I already have invested (much less than if I had gone with a competitor) in Video Renderer 4, which is fast on my system (4930K/16GB) without an Nvidia card. I'm due for a video card upgrade...

 

[Rakehellion]

Interesting that Notebookcheck has specs on the 800Mhz version, which is the Mac version.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R9-M370X.142763.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-950M.138026.0.html

Some scores are close, some aren't so much. Though it also appears to lag in OpenCL performance. :|

 

[gamervivek]

Don't know why it gets lower score in luxmark2.0 while luxmark3.0 seems to favor AMD heavily.

 

[Rakehellion]

Why are people complaining about the CPU in this thing? Does Intel make a faster CPU?

 

[JDG1980]

Why are people complaining about the CPU in this thing? Does Intel make a faster CPU?

Intel just released their Broadwell CPUs with Iris Pro. Many users believe Apple should have waited another month or two so they could have used this instead of Haswell.

If they had gone with the Iris Pro Broadwell, then they could probably have skipped the R9 M370X entirely. Iris Pro does quite well in GPGPU tasks, and those don't tend to be as heavily bound by memory bandwidth as gaming.

 

[3DVagabond]

GM107 would have been much, much better than Cape Verde. It's sad that Apple no longer chooses the best components, but chooses the cheapest ones.

Better at what? If you are talking Windows gaming, that's not really applicable.

 

[coercitiv]

If they had gone with the Iris Pro Broadwell, then they could probably have skipped the R9 M370X entirely.

The new Iris Pro is still around 750M levels.

 

[Rakehellion]

Intel just released their Broadwell CPUs with Iris Pro. Many users believe Apple should have waited another month or two so they could have used this instead of Haswell.

If they had gone with the Iris Pro Broadwell, then they could probably have skipped the R9 M370X entirely. Iris Pro does quite well in GPGPU tasks, and those don't tend to be as heavily bound by memory bandwidth as gaming.

So no, Intel doesn't have a faster CPU. Then why are people complaining?

 

[Tuna-Fish]

Why are people complaining about the CPU in this thing? Does Intel make a faster CPU?

What JDG said, but also while broadwells are not that much faster, they are significantly more power-efficient, which is nice in laptops.

 

[scannall]

The biggest reason most likely is Open-CL support. Apple doesn't support CUDA as it is proprietary nVidia tech.

 

[Enigmoid]

Notebookcheck review is in.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-Retina-15-Mid-2015-Review.144402.0.html

 

[nvgpu]

http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_hevc_e1dc33e840.png

Neither the Iris Pro nor the Radeon R9 have an integrated HEVC/H.265 decoder, so the corresponding videos have to be rendered by the CPU.

There's no GCN 1.1/1.2 versions of Cape Verde, this is a straight up rebrand of 3 year old outdated GPU.

The GeForce GT 750M (GDDR5 model) is roughly 30 % slower than the Radeon R9 M370X, which is another 30 % behind the GeForce GTX 950M.

After we already noticed some occasional GPU throttling, it is not really surprising that the losses in the stress test are even more dramatic. After our one-hour stress test with Prime95 and FurMark (Windows), the CPU only runs at 1.2 GHz, while the graphics card is also limited to just 400 MHz.

Iris Pro 6200 in any Broadwell quad-core mobile CPU would easily outperform R9 M370X in graphics and use less power. You can see it from the desktop Broadwell beating the desktop Cape Verde.

Apple probably is just waiting for Skylake with Iris Pro to launch and dump this old hardware for cheaper cost, lower power consumption and faster performance.

 

[Gikaseixas]

Notebookcheck review is in.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-Retina-15-Mid-2015-Review.144402.0.html

After reading this i cannot compute why Apple didn't go with a GTX 950M or 960M

 

[Arachnotronic]

After reading this i cannot compute why Apple didn't go with a GTX 950M or 960M

Perhaps they are setting the bar low so that when/if they replace the dGPU option with Skylake GT4e, it'll look like an improvement?

 

[Enigmoid]

The performance looks mediocre all around. The CPU is absolutely abysmal. My 3630qm gets 6.4 points on CB 11.5 and ~550 points on CB 15 (which haswell does a lot better). The retina is not really an improvement over that.

IMO the CPU sucks compared to other haswell or ivy bridge quads likely because all the trash 4 + 3e haswell chips are likely being dumped on apple (who eagerly takes them) as they cannot be dumped on the desktop like 4 + 2 chips can.

The SSD has poor random read/write speeds, the display isn't adobe RGB (90% sRGB), the PSU is overworked, etc.

 

[Silverforce11]

Why would you pay so much for such a bad gaming notebook?

Easy. You don't.

You pay to be part of the elite Apple club where logic is thrown out the door.

As long as Apple's well known apps are accelerated with OpenCL, its clear they don't give a crap about gaming performance so to measure it on that metric is irrelevant.