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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wendoman - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Coming soon as usual.I've been using QuickSync fast encoding for free for over a year.
Spoony - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
That's really great for you. Fast encoding with QuickSync is nice. I've used it too, and wished it would get OS X support. Happy to see that is is now.Side note, all of the Windows-based encoders that execute QuickSync use an application-internal package. OS X will be implementing this at the system level, all software today that asks for an encode from QTKit should get it handed off to the fixed-function encoder. It's a much nicer solution, in my opinion.
AnotherNetNarcissist - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Well done. Your medal is in the post.Taft12 - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
That makes you and Anand who seem to care. We're up to two! I've yet to meet anyone else that does.iCrunch - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
...for an amazingly detailed review! This is what I had been waiting for, but nobody else comes even close to the technical knowledge and its applications.I have the "entry-level" rMBP (2.3GHz/8GB/256GB "SSD" NAND Flash) and the first thing I did was to remove Lion and install Mountain Lion DP4 with its thus far single major update. No UI elements ever flashed on me and everything seems to render just right in Safari 6 as well as throughout ML's UI elements and text. That's in both the "Ideal" Retina mode as well as WSXGA+ (1680x1050) and WUXGA (1920x1200). In the latter two modi, everything is just smaller, as you'd expect, but I find that under ML and Safari, it looks (virtually) as good as in "Retina" mode (1440x900).
Have you found any evidence of WUXGA icons in native resolution, for example, as a possible explanation as to why it scales so unbelievably well? I was truly hoping for a second native resolution for SXGA+, which would have entailed an even higher (3360x2100) native resolution, but as I'm typing this in WUXGA, in the highest of the 5 resolution modes, I find everything to appear as though it were native resolution. The crispness of text and images/icons throughout OS X 10.8 ML as well as the absurdly fast Safari 6, or is it all scaling, almost disproving the rule that any display's native (=highest) resolution works best?
As for the SSD, co-incidentally, I had two 180GB Intel 520 Series SSD's in my now former Late-2011 antiglare 17" MBP. I was happy to read through tons and tons of benchmarks spread throughout various articles right here on Anandtech, and even happier to find out that the Samsung 830 Flash that's in my Retina MBP (the 256GB version) and the Intel 520 (180GB) that I had before seemed to be highly comparable in virtually all categories. I am thinking about getting the 2.6 version with the 512GB Flash, but as seems to be the case with the 480GB Intel 520 Series, the 1/2 TB SSD's seem to be a tad slower than those in the 240/256GB range. Any ideas as to why?
IKeelU - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
I believe calling this a "revolution in computing" is hyperbole. I/O is evolving, as it always has. Computer density is increasing, as it always has. If anything, the new Mac Pro demonstrates that much improvement can be had in the device itself. It's not just a matter of improving connectivity to more capable devices.DeciusStrabo - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
I agree, but in the last few years we saw a backslide in screen resolutions on mobile devices. We had 1920x1200, IPS years ago. Suddenly we got 1366x768, TN, glare on the large majority of laptops. So the change to larger resolutions again (not only Apple, others too have started to include 1080p screens with their laptops as mainstream option).But generally you're correct. We moved from 1024x768 on 15-17" screens everywhere to 27" 2560x1440 IPS being available for as low as 600 USD. Over the next 2-3 years 4k displays will become mainstream for TVs. Technology is moving on, Apple is just one to seize if first here.
solipsism - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Why is 1080p being compared to this display? Even the display in the iPad being powered by a mobile iGPU far exceeds that of 1080p.DeciusStrabo - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Because it is the mainstream option available to laptops outside of one single one (and some old ones like the T61)?dagamer34 - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link
The iPad doesn't have to deal with a window layering system which greatly reduces the amount of overdraw it has to deal with.