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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blackmagnum - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
New super resolutions are coming to notebook/ laptop computers. Thanks to Apple and their forward looking business sense. Wonder when it comes to PCs..... with Windows 8?Fleeb - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
I don't get it, I mean, what if another manufacturer thought of the idea first. I guess it wouldn't sell then.KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
It probably wouldn't happen since other manufacturers are more focused on cutting corners and driving costs down as much as possible. Great for making their products more accessible but not so good for putting in bleeding edge technology.Johnmcl7 - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Rubbish, there are plenty of other companies who are far more innovative than Apple whose machines look basic in comparison - Sony's older Z series had a very high resolution 13.1in 1080p screen, blu-ray writer, quad SSDs in RAID 0, integrated and discrete graphics card and the fastest of te dual core i7's while still smaller and lighter than Apple's 13in machines and that was a couple of years ago. Apple aren't even close to touching most of its technology and probably never will.John
tayb - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Link to prove the existence of that product? It does not seem possible to put all of that into a 13" chassis that is thinner than the incredibly thin MB. Honestly, it doesn't possible to fit all of that into a 13" model in general.DeciusStrabo - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Ca...and that's the third iteration of it, 1080p 13.3" - they did it 4 years ago already.
tayb - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
That doesn't have 4 SSDs, which was the biggest red flag in my eyes.Turbobusa311Hp - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
I remember that laptop. It didn't have 4 separate SSD's like you are thinking, but individual chips in a RAID 0. The Signature model was like $4700 though.DJTryHard - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
It had quad Raid 0, 4 separate chips.http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sony-vaio-z-quad-...
To summarize:
Core i7 620M
13.3inch 1080p matte panel
256gb ssd in quad raid 0
6gb ram
geforce GT 330M w/ 1gb vram
optical drive
and all this was in 2010...
extide - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
i7 620M is Dualcore Arrandale, not Quad.Anyways, yeah, that laptop is pretty sweet for it's day.