The next-gen MacBook Pro with Retina Display Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2012 4:14 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- MacBook Pro
- Laptops
- Notebooks
Achieving Retina
To make the MacBook Pro’s Retina Display a reality Apple had to work with panel vendors to build the panels it wanted at a reasonable cost, as well as deliver the software necessary to support insanely high resolutions. There was another problem Apple faced in making the rMBP a reality: the display pipeline of the GPUs Apple wanted to use didn't officially support scaling to the resolution Apple demanded of them. Let me explain.
All modern GPUs have fixed function scaling hardware that is used to efficiently scale between resolutions. A scaler either in your GPU or in your display panel is what lets you run non-native resolutions at full screen on your LCD (e.g. running 1680 x 1050 on a 1920 x 1080 panel). None of the GPUs used in the Retina Display MacBook Pro officially support fixed-function scaling of 3840 x 2400 or 3360 x 2100 to 2880 x 1800 however. Modern day GPUs are tested against 2560 x 1440 and 2560 x 1600, but not this particular 5MP resolution. Even 4K resolution support isn’t widespread among what’s available today. Rather than wait for updated hardware and/or validation, Apple took matters into its own hands and built its own GPU accelerated scaling routines for these higher resolutions. Fixed function hardware is almost always more efficient from a performance and power standpoint, which is why there’s some additional performance loss in these scaled resolution modes.
What’s even crazier is Apple wasn’t pleased with the difference in baseline filtering quality between the Intel HD 4000 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M GPUs. As the Retina Display MacBook Pro would have to regularly switch between GPUs, Apple wanted to ensure a consistently good experience regardless of which GPU was active. There are a lot of filtering operations at work when doing all of this resolution scaling, so rather than compromise user experience Apple simply wrote its own default filtering routines. Since you want your upscale and downscale quality to be identical, Apple had to roll its own implementation on both. Apple’s obsessive attention to detail really made it possible to pull all of this off. It’s just insane to think about.
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RaygunV - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link
Apple has done nothing. Higher resolutions were already in the pipeline before apple released theirs. Apple releases first only so that the public DOES think they are innovative.Apple has done nothing special, just using maturing technology like all vendors will.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-Higher-Reso...
designerfx - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link
the same as apple: improving on plenty of things while missing the boat.apple: lack of improvements on hardware (not their fault, but raising resolution without a substantially more powerful GPU = things tend to suck if you try to take advantage of the resolution).
Note all the benchmarks at the scaled down resolution on the GPU testing. You don't even want to know what these games will run at with 28xx by 18xx.
If 1680x1050 is achieving 60fps, it's not hard to guess that 15fps might be an optimistic answer at 2800x1800.
Meanwhile, all this "Scale the appropriate elements while letting the rest display full resolution" is an important part of the OS that windows 8 probably will miss, entirely.
Spunjji - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
Sony, Vaio Z, 13" 1920x1080. Thanks, Apple? :|starburns - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_High_Definition...Super resolutions have been around since 2005, this retina display is still only half the resolution that other companies have achieved years ago.
KitsuneKnight - Saturday, July 7, 2012 - link
Displays that cost enough to buy 5+ of these laptops (if you find them on firesale!). Not really comparable.optics261 - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
One review to rule them all!zappb - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
With 4k resolution screens to bind them. Apple=progress (finally).After years of ignoring screen quality Lenovo, dell, hp....thanks pingguo.
yhselp - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
One Review to rule them all, One Review to show them, One Review to teach them all and in the darkness more objective make them.eron - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
What software was used to measure the frame rate?Spoony - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Quartz Debug. Part of Apple's developer tools. There is a string you can use to expose additional functionality in Quartz Debug such as resolution scaling factor and manual GPU switching.$ defaults write com.apple.QuartzDebug QuartzDebugPrivateInterface -boolean YES