New 15" MacBook Pro Performance

[Tehben Dean]

Well the graphics card is what draws the screen and I believe debayering r3ds is done by the CPU. Anyone?

At this point I have only noticed it as a slight annoyance and the computer does have two GPUs so if the intel one can run the display presumably the other one comes on to process video etc. And it's possible that this version of Lion isn't quite tweaked to work with it, I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt.

That said this computer is significantly faster then last years model and the retina display is pretty sweet....

[Christoffer Glans]

I would think that debating the merits of a computer, which is a tool, is valid in this context. In these cases respect isn't given ipso facto, right?

To Dean's point, are the GPU and CPU taxed just by simply drawing the screen itself and its 4000 pixels? Does that mean less processor cycles for doing things like rendering and debayering? Is there a resolution to run the screen that taxes the GPU least? I'm thinking about when we used to run Mac OS 7 in thousands of colors as opposed to millions. Something like that.

Maybe a software fix isn't enough, and more powerful processors are the next bottleneck to open up. These are just faster Core i7's, right?

This is one of my concerns as well. Everything about the new macbook pro just screams "buy me", but for me it all comes down to pure power. Is it able to perform well in Premiere Pro and After effects if the screen resolution weights heavy upon the GPU?
I mean, yes, people might find that it works faster in Premiere and AE compared to the last models, but are we seeing a drop in performance compared to what it COULD be if the retina wasn't so heavy on performance? If so, that's really buying a computer that should perform much better then it does... for a lot more money.

[Nick Noev]

I think the Lilly Pad Case / DIT Station ROGUE is designed very nicely. My one concern is COOLING. Can Michael or anyone give real world results of running the system under heavy load for at least 30-60 minutes in an ambient temperature of oh lets say ... 30℃ / 86 far. This is really important.

[Mike Lary]

Well the graphics card is what draws the screen and I believe debayering r3ds is done by the CPU. Anyone?

Without a Red Rocket demosaicing is done by the CPU and color transforms by the GPU.

[Mike P.]

From my understanding, the only way to increase the draw speed is to set you resolution to 2880x1800 at 1:1 (which will be impossible to read.). Any other settings are actually rendering more pixels because of the scaling/supersampling (e.g. 1920x1200 is rendered at 3840x3400 and then downscaled to fit the display.)Definitely a "try before you buy" scenario. Also, assuming you leave the computer alone while rendering it won't make a difference, but as the Anand article said, just surfing the web was pegging one entire core 100%.

[Sergio Perez]

Pardon my ignorance, but if one uses the said 2880x1800 1x1 mode and applications developed with this resolution in mind (like Final Cut X or Aperture, for example) , will the computer run without the struggle of, say, using Safari to do scaling/supersampling? Basically what I also want to ask is, if Red updates redcineXpro with retina support, and Adobe updates CS6 an even Blackmagic its fantastic Davinci Resolve, then surely it will not push as much GPU as, say, Safari that requires the said scaling and downscaling on the fly ? Just trying to understand whats going on here. I ordered one of these and I remember that a Macpro with the 30" cinema display worked fine for 2K editing, and that was a few years ago (2008/2009) ?

[Will Keir]

How are you getting two GTX 580s in a mac tower? Those cards are single land and you have 2x in the 16x slot? Might be something for me to look into as my GTX 285 is getting older.

Do you know if the GTX 580s work with bootcamp / windows 7?

Not exactly sure what you're testing or how ... as Michael said in his first post, the RetDisp MBP really is a game-changer ... and it's not just about the new screen (even though it truly is a sight to behold) it's also about the engineering under the hood ... CPU and the two GPUs - one with CUDA cores! ... we've been testing the 8GB RetDisp with Redcine X, Express Dailies, Resolve 9, CS6 apps, FCP X and Avid and all perform better than expected.

Have also booted Mountain Lion on the RetDisp and it runs just fine.

We haven't tested data throughput with SAS drives like Mike has, but testing with Thunderbolt RAID, Fiber Channel RAID, SSDs and USB 3 single drives gives great throughput speeds ...we're doing dailies on an EPIC feature as speak, using both a MacPro Tower with 2 GTX 580s and a RedRocket and then comparing it against the RetDisp MBP ... sure the MacPro Tower is faster (obviously), but people will be pleasantly surprised with the performance of the RetDisp MBP ... and we haven't even got optimized code yet.

Please be respectful of the incredible engineering that has gone into this new Apple product ... it marks the beginning of a new phase in the relentless wave of Moore's Law driven innovation. Assuming Apple applies some of this engineering excellence to the next generation of MacPro Towers due out in 2013 we'll witness a quantum shift in computing power and functionality.

In the meantime, enjoy the RetDisp MBP ... it really is the game-changer Michael says it is.

Cheers,
Neil

[Mike P.]

Can anyone with Bootcamp do some quick testing: find out if you can let the panel or graphics card do the scaling at less than 2880x1800 under the nVidia control panel. Set it to 1920x1200 or 1680x1050 (1:1). You'd still have an insanely high resolution display (1920x1200 in 15" will be sharp), but without the performance hinderance that happens when you double-res-then-downscale like in OSX. Plus the GT 650m can easily handle 1920 and there would be no weird pixel-scaling crap that happens when an app, picture, game, website, etc. isn't retina ready.