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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nikolayo - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
How come that the part "Vastly Improved Thermals" comes with no data about surface temperatures?ringgix - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
dont forget he also doesnt supply any data for the improved noisejjjjj - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
From the screenshots I've seen, also in this review, it seems like text from applications that don't support the retina display is using subpixel antialiasing. You can see this by zooming in on the pixels: if there is any non-gray colored pixels in black text on white background, subpixel antialiasing is used. Subpixel antialiasing makes no sense when the pixels of the rendered fonts are doubled; the subpixels of a 2x2 "retina pixel" are not laid out in the way that is assumed for the subpixel antialiasing to work in an optimal way.It would be interesting if someone with an rMBP could comment on the perceived quality of pixel doubled text (1440x900 setting) with and without subpixel antialiasing turned on. You can set this in the System Preferences, under the General tab, by toggling the setting "Use LCD font smoothing when available". Changing this setting will of course also influence text in applications that do support the retina display, but the difference would be much smaller, and in this case you would of course expect subpixel antialiasing to produce better-looking text, as the assumptions required for subpixel antialiasing to work are valid.
jjjjj - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
It seems like three external screens are actually supported for the rMBP, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5219#dispnum . "MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) can support an HDMI-compatible device on its HDMI port while also using two Thunderbolt displays."crazysurfanz - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Thanks Anand for an excellent review as always. Just another reason why I keep coming back to Anandtech.Couple of typo's on the GPU Performance page... you've referred to the 6750M (that's what's in the graphs at least) as a 6570M a couple of times (I'm not really that familiar with Mac hardware so not sure which is actually right):
One question I had was around running Windows on these - do you have to run the 'bootcamp' drivers - or can you just install the normal Windows NVIDIA drivers for the GT650M?
With regards to the the lack of dynamic graphics switching / Optimus (in the article you state that only the dGPU is exposed to windows). I take it that it's not quite as simple as installing the normal nvidia drivers and the Intel HD4000 drivers - though I'm not sure what the missing link is here, since there are certainly other Windows laptops with IVB and GT650M that run Optimus - I guess what I'm trying to figure out is - why does the fact that this hardware (IVB/GT650M) happens to be in a Mac mean that Optimus/dynamic graphics switching is unavailable?
crazysurfanz - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
One other thing, what's the backdrop in these pictures... love the colours... and a high res wallpaper (2880x1800?) of that backdrop would be awesome:http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacB...
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacB...
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacB...
Also love the camels:
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacB...
Ryan Smith - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
The current Windows NVIDIA drivers do not work (it's likely just a matter of device IDs), so you need the drivers Apple includes with BootCamp.crazysurfanz - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
So if/when those drivers work - will that then enable Optimus/dynamics graphics switching? Or is there more to the puzzle?chrisledet - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Awesome review Anand.Megatran - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
I don't think you can conclude or suggest that there are "vastly" improved thermals without even using a tool that measures temperatures in comparison to a baseline. That entire page talks more about noise characteristics than "thermal" performance.