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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
471 Comments
View All Comments
orthorim - Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - link
First of all, PC manufacturers are followers.Second even if they wanted to do it, how are they going to get Microsoft to fully support retina mode? It's evident from the review that Apple's had to do a lot of work on the software side to make it work, and it's still not perfect.
That's Apple's huge advantage: They make hardware and software.
The obstacle for a PC manufacturer would be:
- Get retina displays in quantity (same issue Apple faces - it's doable but by no means easy)
- Get Windows to support retina mode - even if MS were willing, no one knows what amount of effort would be involved. I guess it would be extremely hard to do.
- Get gfx card manufacturers to optimize their drivers to it's fast
All of this takes time and effort...
PubFiction - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
None of you get it.Super resolution is a by product of OLED. Not of apple, not of anyone else. LG says they can make a panel and apple pays the highest price to have exclusive access fo a while. Are you guys really so stupid that you think apple actually makes these panels?
IF LG does not push IPS displays down in price and up in resolution OLED is quickly going to supplant LCDs as the premium product.
Let me make it clear to the sheeple, PC companies do not give a shit about you or giving you bette stuff until it becomes neccessary to maintain their business, apple happily sold everyone TN panels with low resolution for years while PC makers were offering IPS, wide gamut in work stations laptops.
gorash - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Come on, 1080p screens have existed for some time, and obviously it would move to 4k at some point when it's ready. From the performance standpoint, "Retina" doesn't seem to be all that ready. Maybe in the next year or so, it will be.OCedHrt - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Although the reviewers at Anandtech didn't really like the Z, it is the best laptop I have used to date.solipsism - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Even if Apple can these 27" IPS panels made at a reasonable price and quantity you still have to deal with rending all the pixels in a way that adds more pros than cons.Remember 4k is 4x the pixels of 1080p. Taking the 27" from 2560x1440 to 5120x2880 is going from 3,686,400 px to 14,745,600 px.
DeciusStrabo - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
4k isn't 4x the pixels of 1080p. 4k is QFHD, which is 3840x2160 (6.1 million pixels vs. 2 million in 1080p).However, since we already have a spec for 8K (7680x4320 ~ 33 million pixels) things to indeed get interesting soon.
lukarak - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
3840x2160 = 8,294,400/
1920x1080 = 2,073,600
--------------------------------
2 x 2 = 4
DanNeely - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
4k is a lot more than just quadHD. I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up being the dominant mass market version; but most current 4k cameras record video at 4096x2304/2160.Ohhmaagawd - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
"emember 4k is 4x the pixels of 1080p. Taking the 27" from 2560x1440 to 5120x2880 is going from 3,686,400 px to 14,745,600 px."I really doubt it needs to double to be "retina".
Not sure what the sweet spot is, but my gut is somewhere around 3500-4000 pixels wide.
Acanthus - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Apple and their forward looking business sense = buying every factory in the world that can produce high dpi displays. (Yes, they really did that)Anticompetitive =/= "forward thinking"