Nvidia GT 650M on rMBP actually better than Nvidia GTX 660M!

December 18th, 2012 → 6:13 am @

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macbook pro gaming

You read me right, and below are all the facts.

To start off, just so that you get a good idea about the Macbook Pro Retina 15″ model, you can go ahead and read the details in this article over from Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/t…display-review

Note the part in the review where he talks about the GPU performance in the new retina Macbook Pro, and also when he talks about the improved heat venting solution on this particular model.

All of the rMBPs feature NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 650M equipped with 1GB of GDDR5. Apple went aggressive on the Kepler implementation and ships a full 384 core GK107 in the rMBP. The GPU clock is set at a very aggressive 900MHz with a 1254MHz memory clock.

Nvidia Specs for Nvidia GT 650M:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/note…specifications (notice the UP TO 900 MHZ)

Nvidia Specs for Nvidia GTX 660M:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/note…specifications (notice the 835 MHz)

HMiV3 gw5XO

Here they discuss and confirm this very topic:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gami…-confused.html

Before: GT 650M GDDR3 version: Up to 850MHz GDDR5 version: Up to 735MHzApple have actually GDDR5 version but with 900MHz cores. Looking at the homepage now, Nvidia have completely changed the specifications.Apple`s GT 650M will beat the Asus GTX 660M (GTX 660M: GDDR5, Up to 835MHz)

Very interesting

Considering the resolution that drives the new mackbook, they would have commited suicide to include a GDDR3, or veru underclocked version of the GT650m. As it seems, they indeed slapped in a “GTX660m”.

So Apple clocked the GDDR5 version of 650M so high to actually be better than a GTX 660M.

Moreover, Anandtech confirmed that the new thermal design actually give for the first time in a mac notebook little to no throttling at all, even after going full-burn CPU+GPU for 20+ minutes:

The final experiment focuses on a hardly stressful game by today’s standards: Half Life 2 Episode Two. Once again, for approximately 20 minutes I ran our standard macbench timedemo test in HL2. I ran both systems at 1680 x 1050, without AA, but with all other quality settings maxed out. This is a bit more stressful than 20 minutes of actual gameplay since the timedemo runs renders all frames as quickly as possible rather than playing back the demo in real time. In the end it worked out to be nearly 40 consecutive runs of our benchmark.Either the CPU or GPU (or both) have to be throttled back over time in order to stay within their thermal and power budgets. As a result, in the 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro, performance drops by over 20% over the course of 20 minutes of this test.The MacBook Pro with Retina Display, on the other hand, remains relatively stable across all runs. While its performance definitely dips, the impact is around 5% off of peak.

So for the first time we actually practically have a ‘GTX’ top-of-the-class mobile GPUs in our macs. Awesome engineering feat with the thermal vents!

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