13-inch Retina MacBook Pro Review (Late 2012)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 13, 2012 2:53 AM ESTGPU Performance
The Core i5/i7 offered in the 13-inch rMBP integrate Intel's HD 4000 graphics. Although it's a significant step above the HD 3000 (and everything that Intel made before it), the 4000 doesn't yet deliver dGPU levels of performance. Instead you get enough performance to drive older games (e.g. Half Life 2 Episode Two) at mainstream resolutions. Even Starcraft 2 wasn't too bad on the 13, but I had to run the game at 1280 x 800 with medium quality defaults. There's pretty much no chance you're going to run any game at the panel's native 2560 x 1600 resolution. Heavier workloads aren't going to fare well on the 13 either.
I'd consider the 13-inch MacBook Pro enough for light, casual gaming, or basically anything you'd run on a MacBook Air - but nothing more. OS X is still not a very robust gaming platform so I don't know how big of a deal this is, but if you care about GPU performance you're going to want the 15-inch rMBP instead.
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jeffbui - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
How are you displaying wifi xmit speed in OS X? Thanks.timmyj9 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
looks like the bands for the wifi test might be the other way aroundgreater range and less throughput over 5GHz (comp. to 2.4GHz)?
iwod - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
I was about to post that. the 2.4Ghz is faster then 5Ghz and they concludes Very good WiFi?Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Thanks for the correction :)Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Option + click on the WiFi indicator to display the additional details. Generally speaking, option-clicking on various things in OS X tends to reveal more information.Take care,
Anand
Henk Poley - Monday, November 19, 2012 - link
Hold Option and click the WiFi menu icon.Henk Poley - Monday, November 19, 2012 - link
Ah doh, comment threads wrap around page boundaries on this site..Galatian - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
You know the 256GB SSD 13" 2012 MacBook Air runs at 1362€ on the Apple Store(with Apple on Campus rebate). The 11" is even less with 1275€. For a very similar specced 13" rMacBook Pro I'll have to spend 1802€ which is roughly 500€ more. I can understand the lack of discrete graphic card but not the lack of quad cpu at this price point. As much as I would like to have a retina display, as I use my MacBook Air mostly in university to write stuff and look at my ebooks, 1802€ get's you actually in the territory of "high" performance notebooks. even then bigger 15" rMacBook Pro is "only" 200€ but in my eyes bring so much more value on the table. Either the 15" is priced to low or the 13" to high IMHO.
hvv - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Agreed. Personally I think Apple made far too many compromises to get the device retina enabled. No 16GB Ram BTO option, No quad core option, no discreet graphics. What's left is essentially a thicker, heavier MBA with retina screen and some additional ports. Even the CPUs in the 13" rmbp and the 2012 mba's (notably absent from the perf charts above...) are similar in real performance. Oi.jramskov - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
"Once again, UI elements, text, windows and icons are also rendered at 4x their size so everything remains legible, but things like images and videos remain unscaled allowing you to fit more content on your screen at the same time."This makes the machine much more interesting. I thought everything was scaled and hence made the machine "unsuitable" for things like working in Lightroom.
Do I understand correctly that the images I work on in Lightroom will not be affected by the scaling?